Gina Covina

Simon and Schuster

New York
Copyright © 1979 by Gina Covina
All rights reserved
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form
Published by Simon and Schuster
A Division of Gulf & Western Corporation
Simon & Schuster Building
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10020
OUIJA and MYSTIFYING ORACLE
are the registered trademarks of Parker Brothers,
Beverly, Ma., for its talking board game
equipment and are used with permission but
without sponsorship or endorsement of this
book.
Designed by Dianne Pinkowitz
Manufactured in the United States of
America Printed and bound by Fairfield
Graphics, Inc. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Covina, Gina.
The Ouija book.
1. Ouija board. I. Title.
BF 1343.C68 133.9'3 78-24571
ISBN 0-671-22840-4
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT

THANK YOU

to the friends who sat at the OUIJA board with me and

provided the practical experience upon which this book is
based;
to the friends and strangers who shared their enthusiasm
and their OUIJA experiences with me;
to th e lib rarians of the Boston Pub lic Librar y, the
U.C. Berkeley Library, and the British Museum;
to Abbie Freedman, Liz Luster, Sally Smith, and Dorothy
Saxe for their energetic participation in the pictures;
to Michael Mihans and Liz Luster for criticism of the
manuscript;
and to Laurel, most of all.

5
 CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 9
CHAPTER ONE Beginnings 18
CHAPTER TWO Letting It Grow 32
CHAPTER THREE All These Make My Words 43
CHAPTER FOUR Oracular Hazards 57
CHAPTER FIVE Everything to Do With
Everything 70
CHAPTER SIX The Oracle's Origins 94
CHAPTER SEVEN Words of Ouija° 105
CHAPTER EIGHT How the Ouija° Board
Works 122
CHAPTER NINE The Geography of the
Great Beyond 138
CHAPTER TEN Leaving the Ouija Board
Behind 152
 INTRODUCTION

41

I am inclined to believe that the OUIJA

board may take honorable place with
Sir Isaac Newton's apple, Watt's
teakettle, Benjamin Franklin's kite and
other historic playthings which have
led to many great results.
-STEWART EDWARD WHITE, 1937

Like most people, I've long been familiar with the OUIJA
board as a source of juvenile entertainment. Until a few
years ago my knowledge of Ouija ended with memories of
late-night shrieks at slumber parties as the oracle revealed
who my ten-year-old friends would marry, or spelled out
forbidden words from "the devil." Then one winter after-
noon my dear friend Laurel brought a Ouija board home
from the corner variety store. It was her birthday, and the
toy a whimsical present to herself. Laurel was struggling at
that time with a difficult writing project; when she saw the
10 THE OUIJA BOOK
Ouija board, she wondered if she and I might be able to
press the device into service as a muse. Remembering the
harmless silliness of my childhood adventures with the toy, I
decided I had nothing to lose.
We began our experiment that evening. In a few minutes
the pointer began to move, and so began a remarkable jour-
ney that brings us with every Ouija session into a more
complete understanding of ourselves and our connection
with all that lives—an understanding not abstract or theo-
retical, but immediate and applicable to the small decisions
we face each day. Such a journey awaits you too—all you
need provide are a sincere desire to understand yourself and
the world, and a willingness to ask questions.
People have used Ouija (pronounced: wee'-jee or wee'-ja)
and tools like it for thousands of years, to find wisdom in
times of decision, or peace of mind in times of contempla-
tion, to diagnose illness and prescribe cures, to receive direct
guidance from God, to talk with friends and relatives who
have died, and to foretell the future. The board's form is
elegantly simple, allowing it to be used in many different
ways and with results ranging from gibberish to complex
essays to perfect sonnets. The device has two parts: a flat
surface on which is printed the alphabet, YES , NO ,
and numerals 0 to 9; and a pointer, a flat, usually
triangular shape shod in felt or with castors so that it
slides easily across the alphabet. Two people sit with
their fingers touching the pointer, which itself sets on
the board or table. A question is asked and the pointer
moves among the letters, stopping on those it chooses for
its reply. The two participants follow the pointer's
movements with their fingers so that they are always
touching it, but they don't push it or apply any pressure.
The pointer will spell out intelligible messages for almost
any two people, but the worth and reliability of those mes-
sages is another matter. When the game is approached as a
silly toy, it is likely to give a silly performance; when it is
 Introduction 11
taken so seriously that those operating the board dare not
question its replies, it is again likely to be silly and aimless, as
is any mental activity attempted without benefit of a
questioning mind. Because Ouija has so often been ap-
proached from these extremes, it has acquired a bad reputa-
tion. To most people the Ouija board is a harmless, but
useless, frivolity; to students of the occult it is an unreliable
method; and to that dwindling number of folk who look
everywhere for the Devil and therefore find him in the
Ouija board, the device is a symbol of evil.
The same qualities that have led to the board's low status
—its simplicity and adaptability to all sorts of expectations
—are the key to its successful use. Once the influence of
our own beliefs on its messages is understood, the silly toy
can become an ideal tool for the unfolding of startling and
useful knowledge for each of us.
The first part of this book will show you how to use the
talking board successfully. We'll begin with your thoughts
and how they affect the pointer's movements, and go on
to getting or making a board for your own use, choosing
a partner, and asking your first questions. Once you're
that far and have started your own experiments, we'll ex-
plore in more detail the many influences on the board's
answers: your attitudes, the setting, and other people pres-
ent, the weather, planetary and lunar cycles and more.
We'll pause to examine possible dangers of the method.
Then we'll take a close look at many advanced areas of in-
quiry for which board is suited, and outline methods you
can use in exploring them; these include dream analysis, pre-
dicting the future, experimenting with telepathy and psy-
chometry, contacting nonphysical entities (spirits), exploring
possible past lives, and using the device for artistic creation,
both directly and as a muse or adviser.
All this information will be distilled both from my own
experiences, and from what has been written about Ouija
and by Ouija (and its predecessor the planchette). There
have been two great surges of interest in such devices in the
12 THE OUIJ A BOOK

United States—one in the 1860's, and the other during and

just after the First World War. These times have seen the
publication of some remarkable tales of experiences and
compelling messages spelled through the board. The authors
of these works have been widely separated by geography
and lifestyle, and often knew nothing of each other's ex-
periments, which makes the already surprising correspon-
dences between their messages all the more startling. First to
appear in print, in 1868, was Planchette's Diary, a charmingly
modest chronicle by an upper-class young lady of New
England. In 1913 "Patience Worth" came through
the Ouija board of Pearl Curran, a St. Louis housewife who
had never been to high school; Patience began a series of
messages in an archaic Anglo-Saxon dialect that eventually
totaled dozens of volumes of poetry, songs, stories and
prayers. A few years later a Chicago couple, both well
known in their highly esteemed professions, began receiving
messages at their Ouija board from a personality called
"Stephen"; they published their experiences, and the outline
of Stephen's comprehensive philosophy, under the pseudo-
nyms "Darby" and "Joan" in 1920 as a book called
Our Unseen Guest. Many more books inspired by the device
appeared at about the same time, all varying widely in style
and approach, but with certain similarities in content. I be-
lieve only one book specifically about the use of Ouija has
ever been published. It is the 1919 Voices from the Void: Six
Years Experience in Automatic Communications, by amateur
psychic investigator Hester Travers Smith.
I'll be quoting from all these authors through the first
part of this book. Details of their intriguing stories will
follow, as will a history of Ouija and of the tools from
which it evolved. The remarkable similarities in the content
of all the messages that have come through the board bring
us to the big question: where do the answers come from?
We'll explore this question from two directions: first we'll
survey the current balance of facts collected by the pioneer-
ing branch of science that is willing to explore the world
 Introduction 13
of paranormal phenomena. From these facts we'll sift out
clues that will lead us at least partway into understanding
how the Ouija board works. When we've followed science
as far as it has ventured, we'll shift our attention to what
Ouija itself has revealed about its workings, bringing to-
gether many different voices to see what sort of synthesis
they might make for us.
All this will lead us (inevitably, as you'll see) to con-
sideration of some very basic questions: what is our relation
to the cosmos, and what can it become? What are we, and
what is not part of us? And what, really, is God? If the
thought of considering "God" and the talking board in the
same breath is uncomfortable to you, then think of Objec-
tive Reality, or Absolute Truth, or the Creative Intelligent
Consciousness of All That Is—everyone who ventures into
these areas, and most users of the Ouija board do, sooner or
later, finds that the pointer creates the name and definition
most acceptable to their particular sensibilities. This is the
deep water we tread in the latter part of this book. If it
seems too far out from shore for you, hold on to your
board and let it float you out past the breakers gradually. By
the time you reach this book's consideration of God, you
may find you feel at home in this sea after all.
Finally, we'll leave the talking board behind. Once you've
learned to use this valuable toy, to recognize through it
when you're connected with sources of understanding, you
can learn to do the same without relying on the board. This
will be the culmination of the journey we are about to
begin.
This nineteenth-century contraption is one of the more complicated
forerunners of the Ouija board. A pulley is attached at one end to
cylinder at the bottom of the table leg, and at the other end to a
pointer in the center of a round alphabet-marked board. The medium
places her hands on the table, and "spirits" begin to move the table
about, thus causing the cylinder on the table leg to roll. the pulley
to turn the pointer, and letters to be spelled out. The alphabet board
is mounted with its back to the medium so that she can't see the
words as they're spelled. As a further safeguard against human
intervention in these "spirit communications," the medium places her
hands, not on the table itself—which presumably she might be
tempted to push—but on a small metal plate balanced on ball
bearings; any exertion of force would topple the metal plate from its
precarious balance. THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK

Another complicated precursor of the

Ouija board used by American spiritual-
ists in the 1850's. THE GRANGER COLLEC-
TION, NEW YORK
Left. Etching of a planchette from an
1868 Scientific American. The planchette
(French for "little board") is the closest
relative of Ouija. One leg of its pointer
holds a pencil, so that when the little board
glides across a piece of paper, words may
be spelled or pictures drawn. Below. A
present-day planchette in operation. PHOTO
By LAUREL HOLLIDAY

In 1913 Pearl Curran be gan

to receive Ouija messages from a
personality who called herself
"Patience Worth." Over the next
twenty-five years, "Patience"
spelled out m o r e t h a n t h r e e
m i l l i o n words at Mrs. Curran's
Ouija.
Above. A s imp le hand made boa rd and poin ter of red woo d.
Below. This positioning of board, pointer and participants allows
the greatest freedom of movement for the pointer.

PHOTOS ON THESE TWO PAGES ARE BY LAUREL HOLLIDAY

 By sitting side by side at the
board, both Ouija partners are
able to see the alphabet right
side up.

The Ouija player on the right is

the author.

It's possible to use the Ouija board in a

great variety of circumstances and with
more than two participants.
 CHAPTER ONE

Beginnings

Your thoughts are not reality but beliefs about

reality. If you want to change the reality
formed by your thoughts, you can change
those thoughts and the reality will follow.
-AUTHOR'S OUIJA BOARD, 1975

That we create most of what we know as "reality"

through our thoughts is a large and startling idea with far-
reaching implications. It is a concept I uncover and under-
stand only bit by small bit through my own Ouija experi-
ments; certainly it will require proof in your own life to
be believed. I set it out on view here, at the beginning,
because using the Ouija board automatically brings our
beliefs and the ways they affect our world into sharper focus.
Since, no matter where the talking board's messages arise
they have to filter through our minds and be pushed out
our fingertips, our thoughts and beliefs are always affecting
(if not entirely creating) the board's answers. A glance at
one way the device has been used will point out some of
the more obvious limitations our beliefs can create.
During the First World War there was a revival of in-
terest in Spiritualism in this country, and a corresponding
rash of popularity for Ouija boards. Ouija was used to
contact the spirits of departed loved ones, mostly sons or
18
 Beginnings 19
husbands recently killed in the war. There was a certain
etiquette to the procedure, usually involving a "control"
spirit who acted as mediator and introduced those from
"the other side" who wished to communicate with the
people at the Ouija board. Usually only personal messages
purporting to come from the departed relatives or friends
were given any attention, and accordingly, such personal
messages were most often the entire content of Ouija sit-
tings. Reading through accounts of such sessions, one gets
the impression that this commonplace, often vague conver-
sation is all the Ouija board can do. "My name is Matilda
Bower. Yes—your own Aunt Mattie. Grieve no more. All
is peace here. Give my love to little Jimmy." Such a
message may have been wonderfully comforting to
Aunt Mattie's family, though it offers no "evidence" of
Matilda's continuing life and no new information about
the land beyond death. It offers personal greetings in a
conventional conversational style because that is exactly what
these Ouija sitters expected and hoped for. The startling and
creative Ouija work of the period, as evidenced in the many
Ouija books published after the war, was without exception
undertaken by people who began experimenting with the
toy out of curiosity, who had no preconceptions and no
strong feelings of grief to sway them.
I don't mean to imply that similar "spirit communication"
is not a valid use for Ouija, but it is a limited use, and limited
only by the beliefs of those who use the board. An even
more severe limitation is chosen by people who are sure
Ouija can be nothing more than a silly children's toy; so
long as that belief is firm, Ouija is most likely to oblige with
frivolous behavior. In fact, whatever beliefs we hold about
Ouija are sure to show themselves when we place our hands
on its pointer. I learned this dramatically the one time I tried
the game with my friend Barbara, on a late winter night
in her Connecticut farmhouse. Barbara insisted she brought
no preconceptions to Ouija, but I wondered as the pointer
began to lurch stiffly around the board, almost as if it had
some great weight to drag along behind it. At the first word,
20 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

"Fire," Barbara's face went white. The next word, "Death,"

set her hands to trembling. When the pointer next turned
to the numerals and began to indicate numbers to us, Bar-
bara broke away abruptly and sputtered, "I knew it, I knew
this would happen." Several minutes passed before she spoke
again; she had kept this fear to herself for many years and
found it very difficult to let out. Finally, she managed to
explain to me how, twenty years earlier, she had dreamed
of a fire in which her brother was killed. Two days after
her dream, Barbara's brother actually burned to death in a
dormitory fire. She became convinced, through the slow
working of fear's special logic, that other members of her
family would eventually meet tragic deaths, and that she
would again see death approaching. For Barbara, the entire
psychic realm held only these dread messages, death an-
nouncements just waiting to be delivered any time she an-
nounced she'd accept a call, as she had done by placing her
fingers on the pointer.
My own approach to Ouija had no such obvious limita-
tions. I had little experience with psychic phenomena of
any sort, few opinions about Ouija, and almost no emotional
investment in what the little board might do. Because I
didn't know what to expect, I granted that anything might be
possible. Which is very different, I must point out, from
saying that anything is possible. Any worthwhile answer
is preceded by a question. Much more may ultimately be
learned from Ouija by beginning with a questioning, even
skeptical attitude, than by approaching the experience with
complete faith. Because I questioned the words of the board,
often insisting that the pointer explain itself more clearly,
I've been able to obtain results far more interesting and
detailed than the usual communications of the "spirit world"
or the predictions of Ouija fortune-tellers. An open-minded
skepticism, a critical optimism—such a balance of attitude
allows every part of us to participate in the experience,
while still allowing Ouija to do what it will.
This book is about how to use the Ouija board in an
open-ended way, allowing for surprises, for changes in
 Beginnings 21
beliefs, for possibilities no one has yet conceived. The
guidelines and methods I'll suggest not only allow for
spontaneity and unknown developments, but actually
keep the way clear for them and provide safeguards against
the rigidifying of our beliefs. just how all this can be
accomplished will become clearer as we go along.
Before we can ask where the answers of Ouija come from,
we must ask where our questions come from. Before you
even begin, take as clear a look as you can at your
motivations for trying Ouija, your expectations and hopes.
Since these will be reflected in the pointer's movement, the
clearer you see your beliefs the quicker you will be able to
spot distortions in the answers. We saw how Barbara's
attitude toward psychic phenomena in general helped bring
about her unhappy experience with the Ouija board. In the
same way, your thoughts about everything enter into the
replies that come from the board, so go on to consider your
beliefs about yourself, about the world, about what you can
control in your life and what is beyond your control, about
what is good and what is evil—nothing is irrelevant. All your
assumptions and beliefs will gain a sharper outline as you
experiment with the Ouija board; considering them from the
start will speed this process and help your pointer to
formulate more accurate answers. Barbara's beliefs—about
evil, about the future, about her role in turning present into
future, her connection with evil, and much more —all were
made visible for the first time by her board experience. Had
she been willing to question the Ouija board further, she
might have discovered, as I strongly suspected, that its
message about fire and death was not a literal prediction at
all, but simply a guaranteed attention-getting device. The
board will bring to our attention whatever hidden
assumptions we carry with us to the game table. If we expect
this to happen, and encourage the process by looking for our
beliefs and questioning them, we may still be frightened by
the Ouija board's disclosures, but we'll be able to learn from
our fear and to move beyond it.
My one assumption about you, Reader, is that your
22 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

interest in the Ouija board has at its base a sincere desire to

know how to live more purposefully, intelligently and com-
passionately. I'm not interested in the more sensational uses
of the device—predicting the future, communicating with the
"spirit world," reading others' thoughts—except as these help
us understand the world and teach us how to live. This is my
bias, and you will see it reflected in these pages. The uses of
the board I emphasize here are many and varied, but can all
be condensed into these general aims:
—to find out more about ourselves and the world
—to clarify our beliefs about ourselves and the world,
and learn to tell beliefs from reality when they don't
match
—to learn to change our beliefs and actions in order
to align them more closely with our growing knowl-
edge of the world
—to find guidance for everyday living, and to under-
stand that such guidance comes from a source con-
nected to us, both in us and beyond us, but never
separate
—to increase the scope of the world in which we feel
powerful and able to make changes
—to understand our connection to the cosmos through
concrete, practical examples of communication be-
tween levels of ourselves—conscious, subconscious,
biochemical, our dream-selves—and levels of reality
we may previously have thought were outside or
beyond our reach __ geophysical forces, the subcon-
scious thoughts of other people, consciousnesses not
focused physically at all, people from other times
—to learn in personal ways what God means.

With these goals before us, let's turn our attention now
to the little board itself, and begin our journey.

You can buy your Ouija board at any store that sells
games and toys. Parker Brothers of Beverly, Massachusetts,
 B eg innin gs 23
owns the trademark on it, so their model is the only one
available commercially. The Ouija board is a simple device,
though, and if you are so inclined you can easily make your
own copy of it for personal use. All you need is a smooth,
level surface at least one foot square, with the alphabet, the
numerals o through 9, and YES and No printed on it, and a
pointer. You can paint the letters on a smooth board, or cut
them from felt and arrange them under the glass of a glass-
topped table—you can even draw them on a large sheet of
slick paper that's taped securely to a tabletop. You may
want to add often-used words like "and," "or," and perhaps
punctuation marks.
The pointer made by Parker Brothers is a heart-shaped
piece of beige plastic that glides on three felt-tipped feet
and has a round, clear plastic window in one end through
which one letter at a time can be seen. If you make a similar
pointer, you may find it easier to use the pointed end as
an indicator, rather than cutting a round hole. Wood is the
usual material and a triangle or heart the usual shape, though
heavy cardboard can also be used, as well as any number
of small objects that can indicate direction. I sometimes use a
starfish; my partner and I each touch two of its legs and the
fifth leg points to the letters. You may find that balancing
your pointer on small pieces of felt enables it to glide about
more easily.
If you do make a homemade imitation for your own use,
be sure to have a smooth surface with very little friction
to hold back the pointer's movements, and be sure to make
the letters large enough that you can tell easily which letter
the pointer has indicated when it stops. All the other details
can be changed to suit your idiosyncracies or your circum-
stances. In a pinch almost anything will work. Friends of
mine, feeling the urge to do some consultation on a camping
trip, made a perfectly workable substitute of the Ouija board
to use for themselves. They scratched out the alphabet with
charcoal in the hard dirt near their campfire, and upturned a
wine glass as a pointer. Whatever sort of arrangement you
use, it's good to remember that any "talking”
24 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

board itself is only a tool and carries no power of its own—

you are the essential ingredient.
Now that you have ready your Ouija board or a substi-
tute of it for yourself, you can give thought to your choice of
partner. Of course, the first necessity is that your partner be
willing to experiment in a sincere and open-minded way and
that she or he be someone you trust. Nothing can be more
frustrating than a first Ouija session consisting entirely of:
"You're pushing the pointer!"; "No, I'm not. You're pushing
it!" repeated 'til you both tire of what seems to you a
hoax. The feeling of the pointer gliding along under your
fingertips, with neither you nor your partner applying any
conscious muscular force, is an eerie surprise that takes quite
a lot to get used to—even when you're sure your partner's
not cheating.
Every combination of two people at the board is a unique
one, a blend distinct from every other and eliciting different,
unpredictable responses from the pointer. With some pairs,
the pointer will dash about frenetically, jerking to a stop at a
letter and then racing in the opposite direction almost too
quickly for the hands to follow. With other combinations
the characteristic pace will be calm and regular. With some,
the pointer may drag along, or in a few cases not even
move at all. None of these differences are arbitrary, and
once you're experienced with the talking board, you can
learn quite a lot about a new partner's personality and
beliefs from the kinds of movements the pointer first
makes.
There are some probabilities that can help you choose a
suitable partner. First of all, children almost always have
good results, possibly because their beliefs are not likely to
have rigidified yet to a point where the pointer's "independ-
ent" movement could be seen as threatening or impossible.
Secondly, sex has a good deal to do with the game's success.
Two women or a woman and a man are likely to make a
good pair; two men may have a more difficult time,
 Beginnings 25

especially in the beginning. This may be partly owing to the

fact that cultural conditioning tends to leave men feeling
sillier and more frightened than women when left to con-
front "the unknown" in a basically passive way.
Passivity, or receptivity, is an important attribute for any
user of a talking board, which may be another reason
women often find more immediate success with the board
than men do. Much of the published information on Ouija
uses the metaphor of electricity to explain the combination
necessary—that one partner must be "positive" and the
other "negative." Hester Travers Smith, amateur psychic
experimenter and ardent Ouija enthusiast, makes this
analogy in her 1919 book Voices from the Void. She goes
on to tell us:
What this means exactly it is hard to understand, but
from watching many combinations at the Ouija board I
have gathered that a "positive" medium receives the mes-
sage through his or her brain and transmits it to the board,
while a negative possesses the driving force—I mean that,
apparently, one sitter supplies mental, and the other mus-
cular power.
The "positive" partner, according to Hester's scheme, is
the one we would call the more passive, while the "nega-
tive" is the more extroverted partner. I've found that the
polarity of "positive" and "negative" is not the crucial in-
gredient here. Two "positive" passive people can make a
fine pair—it is the presence of at least one receptive person
that is important.
Being of a passive temperament myself, and weary of the
ill-repute into which this quality has fallen, I was glad to
discover this—that passivity has its uses and that Ouija
demonstrates them superbly. Passivity is in fact merely a
focus on activity of the inner sphere rather than the exter-
nal. The dictionary definition, of inactivity or submission,
is a distorted view from outside the experience. I have found
26 THE OUIJA BOOK

that this skill of passivity improves remarkably with practice

with the talking board—an improvement of benefit to
people of all temperaments, since control of passivity, or
inward focus, teaches us that we do have control of all our
ways of being, and that all ways have their positive uses.
It's possible for more than two people to use the board
together. In fact, as many people as can crowd around the
board and lay a finger on the pointer can participate. I once
had a finger in the production of a bawdy tale about a loose
woman of ancient Jericho, ostensibly the story of one of
my own past lives, told by a group of six Ouija enthusiasts
at a party. (I still suspect some of them of pushing the
pointer.) Friends of mine sometimes use Ouija in a more
somber and sober frame of mind, for solving domestic dif-
ferences among the members of their communal household.
Most often, however, I've seen group Ouija sessions fall
rapidly into confusion, with only garbled messages resulting
from the many differing focuses of the participants. Or, as
happened with the hot tub session photographed for this
book, the pleasures of sharing one another's company in
such a relaxed and harmonious environment may simply
overshadow the purposeful endeavor of keeping fingers on
pointer and eyes on board, and Ouija may be forgotten.
Try a Ouija session with more than two participants after
you've become comfortable and competent working in a
pair. The same advice holds for the lone player: try it by
yourself later. It's very difficult for most people to get the
pointer moving at all by themselves; the combined physical
energy of two people apparently is usually necessary to
begin and sustain the pointer's movements. Through using
Ouija with another person, you can learn eventually to con-
tact "Ouija knowledge" by yourself without the physical
apparatus of board and pointer, and so bypass the difficulty
of using the board alone. We'll explore this possibility
later on.
Once you find a partner who seems to work well with
 Beginnings 27
you, try game board sessions with her regularly over a
period of time, say one or two evenings a week for as long
as the results intrigue you. You'll learn far more this way
than you could by constantly changing partners and deal-
ing afresh with each one's assumptions and biases. The board
will eventually develop a unique shorthand communication
for each pair of sitters, enabling complex ideas to be spelled
out and understood in just a few words. For Laurel and me,
terms like "energy inversions," "acquiescence to form,"
"dread reality" and "planetary parties" became common-
place and meaningful, after days and sometimes weeks of
Ouija sessions were spent in defining them. These particular
terms have never been spelled when I've used the board
with anyone but Laurel—a reminder that both partners
form the messages and that each message is meant as a
specific and individual lesson.
Now that you have your board in hand and you've se-
lected your partner, you're ready to begin. Arrange a com-
fortable place where you can be alone for one or two hours
without interruption. Be sure to have a pen and paper, or
a tape recorder, to keep a record of what goes on. When
you've become familiar with the habits of your board, then
disruptions and the presence of other people aren't likely
to affect the communications so much. In the beginning,
though, when there are so many factors playing together
to create board response and you haven't identified any of
them, it will be easier if you eliminate some of the more
probable troublemakers. Hester Travers Smith recalls a
Ouija session during which the pointer consistently spelled
out answers that had nothing to do with the questions she
and her partner asked. After they gave up in frustration,
another friend who had been present in the room but sitting
apart in a corner came over and looked at their notes, and
discovered that every answer had been in response to ques-
tions that had been very much on his mind that evening,
and about which the others had known nothing.
28 THE OUIJA BOOK

Unfortunately, such clarity in the confusion of talking

boards is rare. When people present think strong thoughts
on differing subjects, the device's response is most likely to
include bits and pieces meant for each, but all combined in
the same sentence in an indecipherable mess.
Hester Travers Smith had very decided opinions on the
conditions necessary for a successful Ouija session, and she
laid them all out in "Hints to Experimenters at the Ouija
Table," an appendix to Voices from the Void (the text of
which focuses on her own Ouija experiences). The points
she emphasizes are these:
Not more than two people outside the sitters are desir-
able. Any crowd or feeling of strain or even whispered
conversation is sure to interfere ...
Everyone present should be calm and patient. Do not
press for results. One disturbing presence in a room can
ruin a sitting. Select those who habitually come to your
sittings with great care.
Arrange that no one is admitted to the room during the
sitting. The most interesting communications may be
broken off by a servant entering the room or even knock-
ing at the door. . . . The control or discarnate spirit or
sub-conscious mind seems more sensitive to atmosphere
than the living human being.
Such strong admonitions toward calm and patience tend
to make me nervous, and though they are well meant I
doubt we need worry about such instructions as avoiding
interruptions from the servants. The subconscious mind is
sturdy and humorous as well as sensitive, and can no doubt
deal with many adverse conditions that may arise. Our con-
scious minds are the ones needing protection and calm cir-
cumstances at the Ouija table.
Since whatever information comes through the board
must be approved, so to speak, by our conscious minds, we
need to relax the conscious mind's vigilance over our
 Beginnings 29
thoughts, and keep it from following every little distraction.
Gladys Osborne Leonard, a famous British psychic of the
first part of this century, stressed the importance of a quiet
mind:

In fact, the Guides have again and again warned me

never to waste my psychic or mental energy in unneces-
sary talk when I am intending to use my psychic powers
in any direction, either on sittings or creative or construc-
tive work of any kind. I believe that one is throwing away
power when one uses up one's strength in meaningless
chatter. There are times when a certain amount of talking
"loosens" one—an enthusiastic exchange of views and
plans between friends is often very stimulating and opens
the safety valves, so to speak, but one should be chary of
indulging even in this pleasant pastime if one has some
definite work to carry out. I never talk before a sitting
or allow myself to listen to anybody else doing so, if I
can help it.
None of this is to be worried over, or taken as an absolute
rule for talking board sittings. Good and surprising results
can come in a great variety of situations, and in fact the
element of variety, the different and unexpected circum-
stance, can sometimes catch the conscious mind just far
enough off guard that information that had been blocked
can suddenly be spelled out by the pointer. When the pho-
tographs for this book were being taken, Abbie and I sat
concentrating on a request she had made of Ouija for a
personal message. The pointer moved slowly, and when it
stopped we called out the letters to a friend who wrote
them down. We carefully remembered the letters ourselves,
and tried to guess what the next words of Ouija might be.
All the while, Laurel moved around us with her camera and
her stepladder, and three other friends sat by adding com-
ments on the unfolding message of Ouija. Soon Abbie and
I were laughing and joking with our spectators, and as
 30 THE OUIJA BOOK

we did, the pointer suddenly tripled its speed. We barely

had time, between our laughter and talking, to call out the
letters as the pointer spun about the board; we could no
longer even begin to try to follow the message as it was
spelled. When the pointer suddenly stopped, and our scribe
read out the message, it not only made sense, but also con-
tained valuable advice that Abbie might have discounted
or discontinued had she been able to read it as it was spelled.
Never underestimate the value of surprise at the board, and
remember too that the value lies just there, in the newness
of the unexpected turn of events. In general, and especially
for beginners, a relaxing, contemplative atmosphere is most
desirable for your sessions. The benefits of relaxation and
contemplation will thus be yours no matter what your results
with the board should be.
You can arrange yourselves about the Ouija board in
any way that satisfies these three conditions: the board must
be level; your arms must be free to move easily as you
follow the pointer; and you really must be comfortable.
Most people face each other with the board on their knees
or the table between them, and touch the fingertips of both
hands to the edges of the pointer, as if it were a piano or a
typewriter. Your touch should be definitely there, but not
heavy. If, when your partner lifts her fingers from the
pointer, it tilts toward you, you're pressing down too hard. If
you both want to see the alphabet right-side-up, you can sit
side by side and each put one hand on the pointer. In any
case be sure the board or table is low enough that you don't
have to keep your arms raised when they're at the pointer.
Situate yourselves, and take a moment to gather in all
your senses, 'til you feel you're completely present and as
calm as you can be. Don't try to shut out any of your
worries or preoccupations—just notice them slide through
your mind, without stopping to dwell on any in particular.
Notice which thoughts keep returning; these are most likely
the raw material of your first questions to the board.
 Beginnings 31

The attitude you are cultivating is one of contemplation

rather than concentration. In the act of concentration one
narrows one's focus of thought and tries to hold it steady
on one subject—an accomplishment that could only hinder
progress at the Ouija table, where the object is to bring
new knowledge into consciousness from unsuspected
sources and unlikely combinations of ideas.
Though Ouija can bring serious and important insights,
its operation is play, and not to be strained over. Many times
the little board's answers to my most solemn questions have
turned into jokes and teasing reminders for me to relax my
zealous overattention. In this passage from Our Unseen
Guest, Darby has just acknowledged he "accidentally"
knocked the pointer to the floor so that he could catch a
bit of a rest. He goes on to explain his weariness:
"Well, you see, Stephen," I said, "Joan and I discussed
you last night until three in the morning."
"Well," spelled Stephen, "I did not ask you to make a
circus of yourselves, did I?"
Imagine such a remark from out the great beyond!
"Stephen," said I, "in addition to instructing Joan and
me you amuse us."
And Stephen made me an answer which I think pierces
deep. He said, "I laugh yet."

So, with our sincere questioning minds tempered by cos-

mic playfulness, and knowing that approaching Ouija in
this condition we can do no wrong, we'll go on now to
initiate our conversation with the great beyond.
 CHAPTER TWO

Letting It Grow
Look ye unto the seed o' the olive tree,
aplanted. Doth the master, at its first burst
athrough the sod, set up a ruler and murmur
him, "'Tis ne'er an olive tree! It hath but a
pulp stem and winged leaves"? Nay, he letteth it
to grow, and nurtureth it thro' days, and lo, at
finish, there astandeth the olive tree!
Ye'd uproot the very seed in quest o' root! I
bid thee nurture o' its day astead.
-"PATIENCE WORTH," 1916

Using the Ouija board is a skill as definite as riding a

bicycle or speaking a foreign language. And as in those
activities, proficiency at the Ouija board seeps into us
gradually. At first we totter and stammer along, feeling self-
conscious and out of place. The instructions given us
beforehand don't really teach our bodies to balance them-
selves or our tongues to produce unfamiliar sounds. What-
ever I say about the Ouija board, your first experience with it
will be something else. But slowly, as the task at hand
becomes more familiar, we relax our concentration. And
as we relax, there comes a point at which we suddenly re-
alize we're doing it—peddling along without a care, thinking

32
 Letting It Grow 33
in French, matter-of-factly recording the messages of Ouija
as the pointer glides from letter to letter.
Though I can't predict the course of your particular
talking board initiation, I can point out the elements of the
experience that remain true for everyone, and I can steer
us around those potholes most commonly encountered on
the road to Ouija success. First of all, keep in mind that
you are the energy source for the pointer, and you control
this energy through your thoughts. It follows that, to give
the board the most possible energy at your first sitting,
you'll use the thoughts already strongest in your mind. To
create the very most energy, form your first questions from
thoughts you and your game partner hold in common. If
you know each other well, shared concerns should be easy
to find. Is there an unsettled difference of opinion between
you about which you are both concerned? You can ask
how to go about reconciling this difference. Does an event
of the day come again and again into both your thoughts?
You can ask what it means and what you still need to do
about it. Whatever is strongly in your thoughts can be
formed into a question. If you and your partner don't have
shared past experience to draw on, you at least have this
immediate experience with the board from which to start. If
you both feel overwhelmingly silly, you can ask what to do
with your silliness. If the talking board frightens you, use
that fear for your first questions. If curiosity moves you
more than anything else, ask how the device works, or
"who" is answering you. If you do ask a question about
which your partner knows nothing, first explain the ques-
tion and its importance to you to your partner, so she or he
can generate some energy toward the answer. Remember,
both of you move the pointer, generating the board's re-
sponse.
Whatever your beginning questions, it is important that
you don't already know the answers and that you sincerely
want to know them. Don't begin by testing the board for
ESP or asking about the future. Both these areas can yield
34 T H E O U I J A - B O O K
valuable information through the game board, but have
certain pitfalls and require special considerations, which
we'll explore later. Your understanding and proficiency can
grow most rapidly if you focus first on developing a com-
fortable rapport with your partner and the board, and if
you try to notice from the very beginning the ways your
thoughts and beliefs affect the answers.
Let's imagine that you and your partner decide to ask
for help in resolving an argument you began earlier in the
day. There are many ways to phrase your question; some
ways will limit the answers and some will allow a wide
range in which to reply. If you ask, "Who's right and who's
wrong?" the limitations of your ways of thinking, and
consequently of the device's reply, are obvious. Consider
the range of replies and possibilities for resolution allowed
by, "how can we better understand each other?" or, "how
shall we approach this problem in order to benefit most
from it?" Every question we ask at the talking board is,
by the very nature of language, clothed in our beliefs and
prejudices. Sometimes the act of formulating a question is
enough to show us the limitations our beliefs create, and in
that case we can often amend our beliefs and widen our
range of understanding on the spot. Sometimes the board
offers us help in seeing the limiting assumptions hidden in
our questions by its refusal to answer. I am periodically
gripped by a compulsion to attain "perfection," and a cor-
responding feeling of inadequacy at my present state. In
one of these periods I asked Ouija how I could become
perfect. When the pointer refused to budge even an inch, I
conceded that my question was narrowly focused, and I
asked instead that Ouija merely explain what my yearning for
perfection was all about. This time the pointer slowly
spelled out, "Question does not satisfy Ouija." I further
amended my question to, "Could Ouija comment on what
perfection means to me?" The pointer again stated its dis-
satisfaction with the question. Finally I asked Ouija to give
its reasons. It told me, "Focus elsewhere and you will see."
 Letting It Grow 35
I did, and now, much later, I do see: that every time I focus
on "perfection" I'm led quickly into disliking my "imper-
fection," and that the state of imperfection consists entirely
of my belief that I'm imperfect.
Often the limiting beliefs we bring to the Ouija board
are even more subtle and confusing than my last example. It
is important that we pursue these hidden limitations and
bring them to light, even though the process may be end-
less, because our clarity and success with the Ouija board
(not to mention our success with our lives in general) are
directly connected to this process. The more conscious we
become, the more possibilities are opened to us at the Ouija
table. Because our beliefs are so often hidden from our con-
scious awareness, appearing to us simply as "objective
reality," it is essential that we record all questions as well
as all replies at our sessions. Often we can see patterns of
beliefs emerge only over a long period of play.
Knowing the distorting effects of any question, and
wanting to limit replies of the board as little as possible,
some people prefer to avoid asking questions entirely, leav-
ing the pointer free to spell out whatever it will. This often
produces the most surprising and relevant communications.
However, when I was new to Ouija, and even now when
I'm tired or generally unfocused at the board, letting the
pointer go without my conscious direction often means
receiving nonsense or no reply at all. Our questions appar-
ently act as lenses, gathering and focusing our attention in
one area so it can serve as a power source for Ouija. Do see
what the board will tell you of its own initiative; if prob-
lems arise, go back to asking questions for a while longer.
Let's assume now that you've asked your first question
and are eagerly awaiting revelations from the pointer.
Here's where Patience Worth's advice to "letteth it to grow,
and nurtureth it thro' days" is well remembered. At the
very beginning, a wait of up to five minutes for any move-
ment of the pointer is common enough. Often when the
pointer begins to move it appears to "practice" quite a
36 THE OUIJA® BOOK

while, describing arcs and circles and zigzags across the

board. Or it may stop at random letters, or recite the alpha-
bet in order, as if to memorize it. These preliminaries seem
to be part of a necessary learning process, a development
of the connection between subconscious mind and hand.
Anne Lane and Harriet Blaine Beale began experimenting
with the planchette (a predecessor of the Ouija board,
which we'll discuss in Chapter Six) during their lunch
breaks at the hospital where they both worked more than
half a century ago. They described their beginnings:

We were extremely interested but bewildered and

baffled at every turn. It was more like opening a window to
a crowded street and listening to the chance words one
could catch, than like anything else in the world.

Though this nonsense may persist through several sessions

it will eventually give way to meaningful communication
and will not return. Anne and Harriet continue:

On the eleventh day came a decided change. From the

moment we began, the writing was firmer and more im-
pelling, and we were told at once that whoever was using
our hands had come with definite intention, and meant to
stay with us ...
From that date we have been in contact with what seems
to us a clear mind or minds. We were told that as soon
as we could write well enough, we were to be used for a
series of lessons that "they" wished to give us, and that
we were to meet every day and were at liberty to ask
questions which would be answered as far as our under-
standing would permit. We have sometimes been told to
wait for an answer until we knew more, but we have never
had a foolish or irrelevant or unkind response.

Harriet and Anne received twenty-four "lessons" through

the course of their sittings; they were published in 1920 as
a book entitled To Walk with God.
 Letting It Grow 37

Even if your pointer's first movements seem completely

nonsensical, keep a record of the letters or numbers on
which full and definite stops are made. Many times such a
garbled message will remain forever undecipherable, but
the times you can decode the gibberish will make the effort
of taking notes worthwhile. Most commonly, certain letters
repeated over and over are part of a word the pointer is
trying to spell; when the correct word does come through,
you'll be able to see the meaning in those first disconnected
letters. Sometimes the pointer will communicate in riddles
or even in code, in order to bypass the conscious mind's
censure of an answer. Once Laurel and I recorded these
letters as the pointer spelled them: C S A E L N I D F M
0 E R S N S I A A G E ... After staring at them for a
few moments, I realized that two messages were being given
simultaneously, a letter of each spelled alternately. The sen-
tence beginning with the first letter, C, spelled "California"
as its first word. The even letters, beginning with S, spelled
"Send message .. . " Apparently we had evoked two equally
energetic answers to our question, and rather than reject
one of them, Ouija combined them in the most literal way.
Many times the failure of Ouija to reply to a question
can be traced to misunderstandings or ambiguities in the
question itself. This is especially true for beginners at the
board, who most likely lack experience at forming precise
queries. So, if your patience runs out before an answer is
spelled, try rephrasing the question. Keep in mind that your
question should allow for the widest array of possible an-
swers, while still clearly stating what you want to know.
If there is still no answer, ask the board why not. Next,
resort to questions about the board's reticence that can be
answered with a simple YES or NO: Is there a reason it
doesn't want to answer this particular question? Should
we keep trying? Ask about a different subject? Is one of
us (you or your partner) obstructing the reply? These
kinds of questions, if they evoke reasonable answers, can
lead you gradually back into more interesting territory,
with the board cooperating this time in its replies.
38 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

You may get this far without one sensible response from
the board and pointer. Though this isn't likely, there are
many good reasons that can account for it—bad weather,
the need of the device to practice, blocks you or your part-
ner may have about a particular subject, fatigue, hearing
your children tip over furniture in the next room—the im-
portant point to remember is that all these obstructions are
temporary, and it will eventually communicate intelligently
to you. When it does, you can ask the reason for this earlier
nonsense and receive an answer that will allow you to
understand and learn from your first experience.
If difficulties persist through many sessions, you'd best try
another partner. Very few pairs are totally incompatible at
the Ouija board, but some may take much longer than
others to become fluent in its languages. Go back to a part-
ner you first had problems with after you've become pro-
ficient with someone else, and you'll see how your ease with
the board transfers quickly to this partner.
Your "warming-up" period with the game board may last
only a few minutes or extend through several sessions. In
any case, when the pointer begins responding articulately,
every answer it gives will lead to another question; your
areas of inquiry will spring up naturally and be so various I
could not begin to list them. A logical order of progression
will most likely develop in your questioning, though, from
personal to more general and from simple to more complex.
In fact, in order to get to some of the "advanced" areas for
exploration that we'll consider in Chapter Five, certain pre-
liminary questions must be asked, and whatever answers the
board gives need to be assimilated and understood. Ouija
has often told Laurel and me that we must learn to swim
before we can venture out past the breakers (the pointer
no doubt utilizing my fondness for the ocean as a metaphor
for the unknown). What this means is that we must learn
about ourselves before we can clearly understand informa-
tion about the larger world—a general truism, but partic-
ularly valid for talking board experimenters.
 Letting It Grow 39
Since everything spelled at the board must filter
through our minds, we must know the contents of our
minds in order to accurately interpret what is spelled. So
along with anything else you wish to ask at the outset,
include questions about whatever personal dramas or dilem-
mas you're involved with. Ask for advice about chronic
problems—obesity, lack of confidence, etc.—and about im-
mediate upsets or impending decisions with your job or
family or friends. When you can't seem to make up your
mind about something, ask what you're really feeling and
what you really want. Ask about small, everyday aggrava-
tions that keep you from doing and feeling your best—low
energy, losing your temper, minor aches and pains. Consider
the advice and resolve to do something toward ending these
conflicts, even if what you do is not what was advised. I've
never automatically heeded the board's advice, but rather
considered it along with all other advice and my own feel-
ings and inclinations. Even when I've chosen to ignore the
message of the board, I've gained a perceptible amount of
energy and well being by the act of consciously deciding
instead of ignoring the issue or continuing to feel powerless
to change it.
In all you ask, learn to automatically examine your ques-
tions for hidden assumptions and beliefs that may not be
based in reality. The assumptions behind your questions
may be true, but you won't know 'til you take a critical
look at them. Of course, if you assume your beliefs already
echo reality in every detail, you won't even be able to begin
this process. And if you assume that there is no objective
reality, it hardly matters what your beliefs are. You sturdy
souls on either horn of this dilemma are advised to turn
immediately to the second part of this book, where such
questions as absolute truth and the mutable nature of our
beliefs will be pursued through generations of talking board
communicators, and through the domain of modern science
as well, hopefully convincing you along the way.
As the rest of you continue questioning and amending
your beliefs, resolving problems in your lives and
4 0 T H E O U IJ A ® B O O K

eliminating sources of energy-drain, your questions on these

personal, everyday topics will gradually become fewer; some
sessions you won't have any such questions to ask. At the
same time, other areas of inquiry will open up and take on a
new-found importance. A natural balance can be seen at
work, bringing more complex and universal interests and
concerns just as the old ones drop away and make space
in our minds for the new. The talking board itself is our
best indicator of the sorts of questions we most need to
ask, because it cannot give coherent replies to questions for
which we're not yet ready. "Stephen," the voice of Ouija
in Our Unseen Guest, put it this way:
You must understand that we can impress on the sub-
consciousness of a receiving station only those ideas that
the station itself is capable of understanding.

(The "receiving station" is Stephen's term for the person

who receives the message mentally—the partner I've termed
the more "passive" and who Hester Travers Smith called
the "positive.") Ouija can indeed spell out information we
don't know; its limit lies only in our capacity to interpret
its messages, a capability that broadens through every ses-
sion at the board.
I've found that some complex and controversial topics
tend to work well for beginners. One of those with best
results, oddly enough, is reincarnation. This subject provides
an example of information coming through to us not only in
spite of our uncertain beliefs about it, but to some extent
because of the confusion of our beliefs. Whatever we
think about reincarnation is bound to be at least a bit foggy
owing to the difficulties of proving either truth or
falsehood. Most of us can thus ask for information about a
past life without intruding any strong bias of our own
that might distort the answer extremely. Whether we inter-
pret the offerings of the board about our past (or future)
 Letting It Grow 41

lives as literal truth or psychological metaphor, the colorful

tableaus spelled out can bring us valuable perspectives on
the lives we lead now. I've often tried imagining possible
past lives I or my friends have led before asking Ouija about
them; invariably, the stories of Ouija are less predictable
than mine and yet richer in detail and deeper in insight.
Occasionally Ouija even provides verifiable information, as it
did in its story of Laurel's previous life as Lou Jameson, a
plantation owner's wife near Roanoke, Virginia. Later on
we'll give more attention to reincarnation and the various
Ouija opinions on the subject; for now, it's enough to play
with the possibility a bit.
By now you must be wondering just "who" or "what" is
answering the questions you put to the board and pointer.
To ask questions at all it's necessary to assume the existence
of an answerer, some entity with a will and intelligence of
its own. And as you've seen from your own experiments
and from voices of Ouija quoted so far in this book, there
seems to be more than will and intelligence involved—the
answers of Ouija seem also to be imbued with personality.
The pointer may even have spelled a name and other iden-
tifying details if you've asked who replied to your questions.
At this point several easy explanations offer themselves, the
mostly commonly adopted ones being that the replies of
the board are a personification of our subconscious thoughts,
or that the pointer is controlled by spirits of those who've
crossed the threshold of death. There are elements of truth
to both these positions, but those who adhere to either of
them, or even to a combination of both, impose strict and
arbitrary limits on the device's replies and filter out or dis-
tort a great deal of valuable information. Simplicity has its
comforts of which the complexity of truth knows nothing.
These comforts turn quickly to the boredom and frustration
of the cul-de-sac, though, and offer no permanent refuge.
So we'll go on, accepting for now the practicality of re-
ferring to the talking board as a definite personified entity,
42 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

while keeping in mind the complications. The constantly

shifting, complex interplay of forces both known and un-
known that combine to form a unified intelligent answerer
unique to each time and place and pair at the Ouija board
is a wonder not to be dismissed easily. This complexity is
amenable to examination, though. In the next chapter we'll
begin to unravel it.
 CHAPTER THREE

All These Make

My Words
Ouija wears your electric currents, soars on
your breath, dives through DNA. Ideas form
all these. There are your conscious thoughts,
your emotions, your instincts, the knowledge
of your cells, knowledge from your dream
travels, your soul's other lives. All these go
through your fingertips to spell these words.
-AUTHOR'S OUIJA BOARD, 1975

The words of Ouija are a cloak so finely woven that we

can't even see all the threads without unraveling the whole
garment—and if we do unravel it, there will be just the pile
of threads, each one now plainly visible but the pattern of
the whole lost. What we'll do here is look at the larger
threads, the ones we can see running through the fabric and
lift out a bit with our fingers without damaging the cloth.
These threads show themselves in the things we can't help
but notice about habits of the board, its idiosyncrasies and
changes: the questions it consistently refuses to approach,
the sudden change in the pointer's style from sluggishness
43
 @
44 THE OU IJA BOOK

to frenetic movement, the recurrence of a certain word or

theme no matter what the question.
The specific threads influencing you at your board may be
different from the ones I'll describe, though many of
them are likely to be the same. In any case, my main purpose
here is to show you how to look for the meanings in your
board's behavior; I don't aim to explain anything. Hester
Travers Smith advised users of the talking board: "It is
almost useless to sit in disturbed or stormy weather." I
would advise you that storms are likely to affect results, but
not necessarily adversely. And sometimes stormy weather
will have no effect at all. There are no absolute rules in this
realm, just a million possibilities and your common sense
and imagination.
We'll look at environmental possibilities that can shape
the device's words (I include here everything in the physi-
cal world, starting with the messages of our own bodies).
Then we'll explore in more detail the important role our
attitudes, beliefs, expectations and hopes play in creating
the replies. We'll even get to influences more subtle and
ephemeral than hope, such as the confusion nonphysical
entities may perpetrate in their attempts to communicate
with us through the board.
Anything and everything in our environment can in-
fluence Ouija: background noise or music, weather condi-
tions, the time of day, the moon's phase, rings or bracelets
we're wearing, menstrual cycles, planetary positions, our
physical comfort and health, sunspots, the predominant
colors surrounding us—yes, anything. All these variables
and more can help shape the board's words or establish its
tone, but of course this doesn't mean that all or even any
of these influences are at work at once. There is no simple
cause and effect here. Rather, the innumerable ingredients
that can go into the words of Ouija are preexisting factors,
spices on a shelf, that call for our selection and combination
in order to be brought into the actual feast. The parts of
us playing chef are usually far removed from our conscious
 All These Make My Words 45

minds, so it seems to us that influences outside our control

are at work.
For the five long months of Boston's winter of 1975,
Laurel and I met almost every night for an hour or two at
the Ouija board. We were enthusiastic, excited, even zealous
about our Ouija experiments, so we felt quite irritated when
every month, a few days before the new moon, the replies
of Ouija suddenly jumbled into silliness. The pointer
declared to us that our Ouija had "fallen in love with the
moon." If we insisted on continuing, we had to put up with
endlessly repeated loops around the moon's picture on the
board, with an occasional "0 Beautiful Moon, I Love You"
interjected. As the moon waxed and our articulate and sen-
sible voices returned, we asked the reason for this odd be-
havior. We were told simply that "everything needs to rest"
—and we got the message, grudgingly at first, but with in-
creasing appreciation as the months went on and we began
to actually look forward to the five or six days surrounding
the new moon on which we had to make do without Ouija.
Each time we find an environmental factor influencing
the board's words, we can be sure it holds a special lesson
for us. We have emphasized that particular ingredient at
this particular time for some good reason. You may have
guessed that if Laurel and I were at the Ouija board every
single day, we just might have been as compulsively active
in other areas of our lives as well. It's true. We needed the
message that rest is a necessary part of the cycle of activity,
so, behind the sight of our conscious minds, we selected the
already existing reality and metaphor of the moon's cycle
and created with it a drama to show our conscious, directing
selves the value of rest.
This moony example highlights the interweaving of our
individualities and the environment. Obviously not every-
one's board will fall in love with the moon each month,
even though the moon's cycles are a definite reality. Because
all the environmental influences I'll mention here are possi-
bilities that depend for their manifestation on our particular
46 THE OUIJA BOOK

interaction with them, none of them are verifiable in an

objective, scientific sense. The moon's effect on your talking
board experiments may be the opposite of my experience; it
may be similar one month and very different the next; the
moon may be entirely irrelevant to your ventures at the
little board. We need to look for particular, individual
meanings in the board's behavior, rather than general rules
applicable to everyone at every time. The "scientific" ap-
proach, in which the observer is assumed to be separate from
and not affecting the phenomenon he or she observes, has
begun to be discredited even in traditional science itself.
In such tenuous psychic interactions as ours with Ouija, it is
especially important for us to remember that we are an
essential part of whatever happens at the board.
Another aspect of the "scientific" viewpoint we can do
without is the notion of true and false. If stormy weather
has no effect on your board's temperament, there's no need to
conclude that weather does not affect Ouija, or even that
weather does not affect your board. The fact that a particular
influence is not operating for you now does not make it false;
its inactivity simply means it is not acting. The possible Ouija
influences are a vast storehouse of potentials that actualize
only in combination with our particular needs and
idiosyncracies as they emerge in a particular time and
setting.
Setting—let's start here, with the most obvious elements
that may influence our talking board experience. In the first
chapter we looked at some of the possibly important factors
of the game board setting: noise, comfort, interruptions, the
presence of other people. You may find it helpful to look
around and listen for a few moments at the beginning of
each session, both as a method of centering yourself into a
contemplative state of mind, and as a way to notice what
aspects of the environment are important to you now and
are therefore likely to affect your board's behavior. One
day, the sight of afternoon sunlight illuminating dust par-
ticles that sift through the air of my room might help slow
 All These Make My Words 47

my pace and ease me into a state in which Ouija could tell

me of the eye of God floating in every molecule, or perhaps
give detailed suggestions about my partner's diet that I'd
formerly not had the patience to receive. Of course the
same sunlight on the same dust might irritate my partner
greatly, starting him on a chain of worries that could begin
with the cough he had last month and go on to the general
problem of pollution and from there to a sudden feeling of
suffocation, with occasional darts of ill will toward me,
the sloppy housekeeper.
Obviously any element of the environment could be im-
portant, so there's no use in my cataloguing possibilities
here. We don't need to actively look for environmental
influences in our sessions, asking ourselves whether one ele-
ment or another is affecting us. All we need to do is notice
what's already happening right now. What environmental
ingredients grab my attention, what is it about them that
affects me and just how do I feel affected?
One environmental factor that's always affecting the
words of the board in some way is the relationship between
you and your partner. Though there's no particular kind
of relationship between partners that guarantees a more
successful session—I've had interesting results with total
strangers and with intimate friends—it's especially impor-
tant for both of you to notice what's affecting your feelings
and thoughts in this part of your environment. One time,
in the midst of my first Ouija session with a new acquain-
tance, I became aware that I was sexually attracted to my
partner. I strained hard to ignore those "inappropriate" feel-
ings, and was rewarded for my efforts with a Ouija message
that amounted to an obscure and poetic proposition to my
partner. Whatever unacknowledged feelings, thoughts, de-
sires or expectations you hold about your partner will show
themselves somehow in the board's communication, either
by spelling themselves out directly or by jumbling in with
other messages or by creating general confusion in the
board's replies. Sometimes I've attempted to use Ouija in
48 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

place of direct communication with my partner, when what

I've had to say was risky or unclear, and in most of those
cases the pointer has simply spelled "No Ouija. Talk in-
stead." At other times I've wanted to impress my partner
with an especially interesting Ouija "performance," and
that desire has certainly influenced the device's reply—and
not often favorably.
Jewelry and clothing can have specific influences on the
little board's behavior. Certain colors in our clothing some-
times affect our emotional states or trigger particular mem-
ories or associations that then show themselves in the mes-
sage. Some people find they have a ring or bracelet that
seems to focus or intensify the pointer's energy—if this is
so for you, then by all means take advantage of it, keeping
in mind the possibility that it may be your belief in your
grandmother's garnet ring, rather than the ring itself, that
lets it work its magic for you. Other times jewelry seems
to interfere with the working of the board; I've seen the
pointer spell out a request for the Ouija board users to
remove their rings and bracelets before continuing.
As well as these many "exterior" elements of the physical
environment, there are the environments of our bodies or-
chestrating the board's words, in ways as obvious as the
distracting effect of a backache or the crisp speediness im-
parted by a cup of coffee, to the subtle influence of our
bodies' responses to the seasons or the even more nebulous
whisperings of cellular memory. "Stephen," one of the most
articulate voices of Ouija documented among the rash of
Ouija books published in the 1920's, emphasized the body's
contribution to our delicate endeavor:
You must, of course, take into account the fact that your
body has of itself consciousness quite distinct from your
own. In a sense, your body may be said to be a stress point
of various cellular forces. It is, as the physiologist puts it,
composed of a vast number of cells, independent of one
another, yet so related as to constitute a whole. Now, each
 All These Make My Words 49
of these cells has a life of its own, a consciousness of its
own.
My own board's voices have reminded me often of the inter-
connections between board and body. The quote at the
beginning of this chapter hints at the wonder of connections
beyond any we might hope to rationally explain; we'll hold
on to that wonder (or disbelief or confusion or whatever
your response may be to the thought of the board diving
through DNA and soaring on your breath), but venture first
into more mundane and obvious relationships between body
processes and talking board.
Comfort and health are always important variables of the
experience, affecting our attention span, degree of recep-
tivity and general attitude toward each session, which in
turn affect the specific style and content of the board's
message. Here is the only point at which my suggestions
are likely to verge onto the territory of rules: do not attempt a
session when you are ill or fatigued, either physically or
emotionally or psychically. I don't mean for anyone to put
away the Ouija board at the first yawn or sniffle; I do want
us to acknowledge respect both for ourselves and for the
board by setting it aside when we are tired or in pain. Some-
times the low energy or discomfort of one partner will
merely slow the pace of the pointer's responses. Sometimes
the content will be blurred or incoherent. Sometimes all
movement will stop. No matter what the results in such a
case, there is a possibility that the already tired user will
feel drained and even more tired from the effort, and there
is seldom good reason to pay such a price for the board's
words. Sessions with an energetic partner can be entertain-
ing and useful for someone who's bedridden, as long as the
ill person is not distracted by pain and remembers to stop
when fatigue begins to appear. Using the board consumes
more energy than the slight bit of physical movement in-
volved intimates.
There are other physical variables both more subtle and
50 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

more regular than health that can show themselves in the

board's words. These are the many different cycles of
change our bodies undergo in response to the cyclic changes
in the natural environment: the daily cycle of metabolic ups
and downs that gives us energy every morning, lets us down
in late afternoon, up again in the evening and way down
during the first hours of morning; the monthly fluctuation
of moods with which women are blessed and cursed; the
seasonal changes that prompt us to feel like "settling in" for
winter or start us thinking about travel or new projects in
the springtime. Again I'll emphasize that none of these in-
fluences acts in one particular way—they are as individual
as we are, and change from day to day as we do. I've had
periods when using Ouija first thing in the morning felt best
to me and seemed to help produce the truest results, un-
clouded by the events of the day. At other times late eve-
ning has worked best, and at others, dusk. Sometimes the
hour of the day has appeared to be an important variable
in my Ouija explorations and at other times it has made no
difference. If you're interested in learning more about the
most likely directions for these cyclic influences to take, a
good source of information is Gay Luce's book called Body
Time (it's available in an inexpensive paperback edition by
Bantam Books).
The idea of metabolic cycles gives us another way to view
the board's lunacy described earlier in the chapter. If and
when the moon's cycles do affect the board's words, it is
through the mediation of our bodies; our physical organisms
may respond in particular individual ways to the ebbing and
flowing pull the moon exerts equally on us all. Now we can
understand more easily how such influences as the moon
have no constant, measurable effect on Ouija, even though
they have definite potential effects.
The orbiting cycles of the planets and their differing
positions in relationship to the earth may also contribute
their share to our talking board results. This is the province
of astrology, and I would not venture here except that Ouija
itself has led me. When I began my oracular experiments
 All These Make My Words 51
I possessed not only an absolute dearth of knowledge about
astrology but an active skepticism about it as well—the
same held true for Laurel, my usual Ouija partner. We made a
habit of asking the board what influences were at work—
why were the replies flip and silly last night, why such rapid
movement today, what triggered this ocean imagery—and
occasionally we would be puzzled with answers like "Earth,
sun and moon in trine," or "Saturn retrograde" or "Mer-
cury draws near." Eventually I became curious enough to
check all this out with a competent astrologer, and found not
only that the terms Ouija had used were real astrology
jargon, but that the planetary movements described had
indeed been taking place on those dates. For a while I pur-
sued astrological influences enthusiastically, assuming they
were stable, unchanging indicators of Ouija behavior. Ouija
cooperated at first, giving such information as "The best
time to use the board is Mercury Moon—when Mercury,
moon and earth are in trine or sextile relationship, messages
speed to you." I was impressed—until Ouija began to poke
fun at my seriousness ("What has the recent influence of
Pisces been?" "Cod liver oil"), and I had to remember that
influences on Ouija are changeable, at times even fickle,
as we ourselves can be.
The last environmental variable I'll mention here is
weather. Our bodies do go through chemical changes in
response to dips and rises in the atmosphere's humidity,
barometric pressure and temperature. Those of us with
tendencies toward achey bones know that our bodies often
forecast weather changes days in advance; even when we
don't consciously feel our responses to the weather, we are
often experiencing subtle changes that can be picked up at
the board. I've used this assumption in consulting Ouija
about travel plans, and have several times avoided sudden
New England snowstorms that broadcast their coming to
my body before they announced themselves to the local
meteorologists. I asked Ouija on one of these occasions
(four days before the largest storm of the year for northern
New England) how it is that we knew snow was on its
52 THE OUIJA- BOOK

way. The reply: "Bones either add calcium or release it

according to pressure in air." Did that mean our bones
release calcium when the barometric pressure falls, as it does
before a storm? "Yes." I asked why our bodies behave this
way and the pointer spelled "To help storm begin. Everyone
creates storm."
What I hope to have conveyed by this profusion of possi-
bilities is just what my explorations at the Ouija board con-
veyed to me: a hint of the astounding and far-reaching
interconnections between us and the world "out there."
The beginning of this awareness is one of the most valuable
lessons the talking board can give us, far outweighing the
significance of the specific environmental influences we find at
work in any particular time and circumstance. Ouija has
often advised me to forget it and listen to its messages. In
the same way, we'll benefit by noticing the message of con-
nection and communication behind the details that form and
influence the board's words.
Now we'll leave behind such tangible talking board in-
gredients as moon madness and dust particles, and take a
look at possibilities not usually seen as physical at all. First,
our thoughts. We've already considered how our thoughts
and beliefs may shape not only the device's words but our
realities as well. Maybe we can imagine this to be true in some
large vague way, but what does it mean as we sit at the
board table? Should we make a mental effort to direct the
pointer with our thoughts? Should we attempt to control our
thoughts, think "positively" or concentrate on the reply we
want? You may have guessed my answer is "No." It is
possible to control the board's performance directly with
our conscious thoughts, but then we will have learned noth-
ing. The little board's value lies in its capacity to mix to-
gether a great number of disparate ingredients, most of them
strangers to our conscious awareness, and present us, out
of that jumble, with a surprisingly coherent brew not quite
like any we've tasted before. The value of the idea of
thoughts forming reality is in noticing, not controlling; as it
becomes apparent at the board, simply notice the
 All These Make My Words 53

correspondence between your thoughts and the board's

replies. As you begin to experience instances of this idea's
truth, you will begin automatically to perceive the power in
your thoughts, and you'll begin to regard them with the
same importance and sense of responsibility with which you
view your actions.
This is a largely automatic process, needing our recogni-
tion and attention but not our meddling or control. I've
found it helpful to visualize my thoughts, as I sit at the
Ouija board, as floating in a river that flows through my
head. I watch each thought as it flows by, but I can't stop
the river or reach in and grab a thought from it. I give each
thought my attention as it passes me, and when it floats
downriver out of my sight, I let it go completely, and turn
my attention upstream again to wait for the next thought.
Whatever is valuable about the thought I've just let go will
flow by again—there's no need for me to collect thoughts
and hold them tight.
In the first chapter we looked at the possibility of people
other than the two persons using the board influencing the
pointer's replies. What about the influence of people who
not only are not present, but are not physically existent at
all? Communication with "ghosts" or "spirits" is the best-
known use of the talking board and at the same time the
least understood. The next chapter, "Oracular Hazards," is
the place for our critical spirits to emerge and meet the
board's versions of spirits. First, though, we'll courteously
consider the reality of nonphysical entities as they present
themselves, and listen to what they have to say about in-
fluences on the device's words from their vantage points.
The published accounts of spirit communication through
the Ouija board, and my own experience with definite Ouija
personalities, and the many stories I've heard, all agree about
the difficulties involved in this tenuous venture. The spirits
say they are just as thoroughly in the dark as we are, that
they gropingly experiment with communicating through
Ouija and often make a mess of their attempts. They assure
us that crossing death's threshold does not impart "super-
54 T H E O U I J A - B O O K
natural" powers, nor does it necessarily bring clarity or wis-
dom—death simply marks the beginning of a different realm of
experience, and from that realm this physical world often
appears as hazy and insubstantial as death's realm is to our
vision.
Certain spirits claim to have more facility than others in
making the connection between worlds, just as some of us
may find it easier, but the linking of appropriate corporeal
and noncorporeal partners in this venture is a small begin-
ning, leaving many challenges still to be met. Simply zeroing in
on the intended receiver of their messages is a big accom-
plishment for the spirit communicators. As Stephen the
spirit explains it:
A wireless station often picks up messages not intended
for it. In the same way our messages are often picked up
by earth stations for whom they are not intended. It some-
times happens in such cases that the receiving station gets
parts of one communication jumbled up with parts of
another. These cross-currents are unavoidable, and the
coloring they cause is quite as annoying to us as to you.
"Coloring" is a common term among those who receive
communications from that land beyond. It refers to distor-
tions in the message. Any way in which the message as it is
spelled out at the board differs from the message as it was
intended by the sender can be called coloring. Some
coloring is present in every board communication—since
wherever the words originate they filter through our minds,
our feelings and vocabularies and compulsions, there will be
parts of us in every message—but when our assumption is
that some nonphysical personality is attempting to spell the
words, we will naturally try to minimize the participation
of our personalities in the formation of the board's message.
One conceptual model for spirit communication is that we
relax and keep our conscious thoughts from interfering with
the device, and that we somehow allow the spirit personality to
temporarily inhabit our subconscious minds. The spirit
 All These Make My Words 55
can then use the contents of our minds as raw materials,
combine them in his (her? its?) own way and present a
message essentially his own rather than ours. Obviously this
process provides infinite opportunities for coloring. Stephen
tells of a few of them (remember that "receiving station"
is his term for the user of the board):

Coloring occurs not only as the result of the receiving

station's conscious mind overruling the subconscious, but
also whenever, in the course of communication, the sub-
conscious mind frees itself from our control. Immediately
it gives expression to that which is its own thought and
experience. In the case of the Ouija board there is the
additional possibility of conscious overruling.

When it comes to communicating specific details, the spirits

have an even more difficult time, as Stephen goes on to
explain:

It is very hard to get a name through, that of a person

or a place. Dates are very hard, and so are all other con-
crete items. It is a small matter for me to convey through
this station an idea that impinges on no association per-
sonal to the station. I can dictate my revelation through
Joan, unfamiliar as its terms have been to her, with much
greater accuracy than I could state through her my old
preference in furniture or flowers. Mention by me of any
of the familiar things of living would stir immediately a
host of her own subconscious associations.
The planchette, a small board that looks like the pointer
of Ouija, with a pencil implanted as one of its three legs,
can sometimes be a more accurate tool than Ouija when the
object of our efforts is spirit communication. The planchette
is operated in the same way as the Ouija board, except that
it is placed on a sheet of paper and so writes directly with
its pencil-leg in one continuous scrawl. Many instances have
been recorded of planchette messages written in an exact
56 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

replica of the handwriting of the deceased person claiming

to communicate, even when the planchette's operators had
never seen the communicator's handwriting. A British man
with half a century of involvement in psychic investiga-
tion told me of an attempt in which he participated to con-
tact a friend's dead father. The four friends, one of them
the son in question, sat in a pitch-dark room with their
hands on a planchette. The toy made short marks not at all
like handwriting and they all thought, as they sat in the
dark, that nothing would come of it. When the planchette
stopped and the lights were switched on, the three men who
hadn't known their friend's father were mystified by the
sight of a complicated drawing of an antique German beer
stein. The son went to a cupboard across the room, opened it,
and returned with a mug that fit the picture's description in
every detail—the father's beer stein, of course. The
friends considered their attempt a successful one.
You and your partner may never again sit down at the
board feeling sure that you are really alone. You may harbor
the suspicion, after considering this welter of possible
voices, that there is much more going on in and around you
than the surface of your awareness reveals. If this is so, if
you find yourself wondering what phase the moon is in as
you begin a session, or you see your partner glancing over
her shoulder from time to time as if she half-expects to
catch a glimpse of the real author of the board's words, then
I'm glad, because my aim in this chapter has been met. It
seems that knowledge serves mainly to deepen mystery
rather than to erase it. In our Ouija exploration, as perhaps
in anything else, the more complexity we bring to our
awareness, the more mysterious and exciting, and yes, con-
fusing, too, does our venture become. It is at this point,
when we have already cultivated a certain richness and
depth in the way we approach Ouija, that it will be most
fruitful for us to examine the hazards and pitfalls that may
beset us at the board.
 CHAPTER FOUR

Oracular Hazards
Undoubtedly, the very fact of development
accentuates one's characteristics, both bad and good.
One becomes more sensitive to feeling, suffering,
impressions of all kinds; therefore, all the more
reason to know yourself ... before you commence
this "opening of the door." It is not the
machinations of evil spirits you need fear, but
the operation of your own subconscious shortcomings
...
You will have nothing to fear from "evil
spirits" if you have nothing to fear from your-
self.
-GLADYS OSBORNE LEONARD,
My Life in Two Worlds, 1931

That's a fine statement, Gladys, but who among us really

lives as if she had nothing to fear from herself? At our
talking boards we are allowing the vast unknown to intro-
duce itself and speak to us; we are letting the unconscious
contents of our minds surface and spill their secrets. Each of
us has hidden away information and experience that we
judged wrong or blasphemous or nasty or inappropriate or
crazy or somehow contrary to our beliefs. Such information

57
58 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

doesn't disappear—it simply slips below our conscious recol-

lection. Augmenting our individual stashes of taboo percep-
tions are the taboos of our family, social circle, religious
group, and eventually of our culture as a whole, all of them
backing up our individually rejected perceptions with their
power and authority. It's no wonder that when these long-
ignored contents of our minds are finally given a chance to
speak, often for the first time through the Ouija board, we
may respond with a suddenly overwhelming feeling of
terror, sometimes not at all connected with what is actually
spelled at the board. The first independent movements of
the pointer may spark the same fear—"This instrument is
out of my control. What terrible secrets will it divulge?
What demon moves it through me?" Let's look at what it is
we fear so much.
Evil is not a subject about which I have any special
knowledge; in fact, I'm often confused about its nature and
workings. Still, by a combination of experience and inspired
guess I can bring a small light into evil's cavern, and with
it we can see our way safely around some of the obstacles
that have tripped up many Ouija users before us. In Chapter
Six when we look at our oracle's origins, we'll see that it
began its career with no taint of evil. The reason for this
is that it emerged in a cultural context (in China and then
ancient Greece) in which many gods were respected, and
in which good and evil were intermingled freely and con-
sidered equally necessary parts of reality, expressed in the
flow of seasons and in the cycles of decay and renewal, death
and birth, that are acted out by all that lives. It was the rise
of Christianity, with its insistence on just one god—a god
who is only male and only good and has no darkness in Him
—that forced the separation of good and evil and the creation
of a realm of feminine darkness that could hold everything
ungodly. The contents of this dark realm were not even
to be looked at—they became what we call the unconscious.
Of course I'm exaggerating in order to make a point. Of
course the unconscious existed in ancient Greece as
 Oracular Hazards 59
thoroughly as it exists today; the difference is in the access
and interplay between the lands of the known and unknown.
Now we can see more clearly why use of Ouija has been
strongly condemned by those Christian sects that have not
simply ignored the oracle's existence; the little board does
provide an avenue of access to psychic regions the church
has turned over to the devil. Many people involved in what
is usually called "the occult" (Edgar Cayce prominent
among them) have also denounced the Ouija board as a
dangerous toy too easily prey to evil influences. The presi-
dent of London's College of Psychic Science refused to
speak with me, or even to peek out his office door at me,
when his secretary told him I was writing a book about the
Ouija board. He conveyed, through the secretary, his sin-
cere hope that I abandon such a dangerous activity at once.
This perspective is basically identical to the church's view
and has its roots, and branches too, in the Christian separa-
tion of good and evil. Psychics and trance mediums derive
their belief systems from the culture in which they live just
as thoroughly as do the rest of us.
I hope it's already apparent that I'm not about to advocate
embracing evil. Neither do I mean to imply that use of the
talking board and personal Christian faith cannot go hand
in hand. What is important for us to realize in the midst
of this little metaphorical history of good and evil is that at
least part of what we think of as evil is culturally defined
and changes as our culture does, and that a large part of our
response to evil and our attitude toward it are also cultural
habits and can be changed. We'll soon see that all these
considerations will be a great help to us at the Ouija table.
The psychic region called the unconscious has served as
a catchall for every imaginable sort of outcast idea and feel-
ing; many of the creatures we'll find roaming about in its
darkness, glimpsed in our minds or showing themselves in
the board's words, will seem silly distractions at worst, cer-
tainly not evil. One of these creatures who appears fre-
quently at the Ouija board is the prankster. He may
60 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

suddenly subvert our most serious quest for meaning with a

joke or sexual pun; he may lead us into what seems to be a
revelation of the secrets of the cosmos only to end by telling
us that God is a peanut butter sandwich. The prankster can
be a vague tendency showing itself in a session, or a definite
personality who announces his presence with a particular
name and style. He is one aspect of the devil, that element
that delights in sacrilege, that loves to take away meaning and
scoff at our sincere spiritual yearnings.
There is an element of danger here, in talking board
pranks that may entertain or annoy us, and perhaps some-
times shock us, but seem ultimately harmless. I'm approach-
ing this "silly" aspect of evil first because here it's easiest
for us to see that the danger, the real possibility for destruc-
tive or divisive or meaningless action in the world, lies not in
the words of Ouija, but in what we do with them. A
Ouija story of an imminent Martian invasion of the earth
may sound like a threadbare joke to most of us; to one
lonely retired man the board's announcement of this coming
event brought temporary meaning to a life gone dull, and
conferred on him an important imagined role as liaison be-
tween Martians and humans. Gullibility and literalism are the
vehicles that carry us into such dangerous regions. Though
our areas of gullibility may not be so obvious as the
Martian ambassador's, each of us has vulnerable points
somewhere, points at which, to bolster our sense of personal
importance, we may be tempted to read the device's words at
face value only.
One example of this process at its most charming and
naively sincere is shown in a pamphlet called "The
Secret of the Successful Use of the Ouija Board" (technically
true to its title, this little book speaks of the "secret" but
does not divulge it). It is the work of Clarisse Eugenie Perrin,
assisted at the Ouija board by Nellie Irene Walters. Even
their names sound gullible. Clarisse modestly introduces the
board's words, which make up most of the book, this way:
 Oracular Hazards 61
My vis-a-vis and myself, as the mediums, or rather part
of the mechanism through which this work has been dic-
tated upon the Ouija board, did not anticipate any results
of a wide, serious or religious nature when we commenced
to toy with one, bought unsuspectingly as a game to help
the children of the household to pass away the long dark
days of an Alaskan winter....
But Heaven, in its wisdom, took practical advantage of
the undisturbed evenness of the "electric lines of space"
upon which the spirit folk travel, according to their state-
ments, in that vast and weird domain of our own United
States....
Since coming to California this past summer, and review-
ing the up-to-date literature upon psychic subjects, I am
still thoroughly convinced that these dictation, received
in the domestic circle in that northwestern corner of the
earth, unfaltering in their diction and strength, are the
greatest encouragement, fact, and revelation that this world
has ever received through the void.
The great encouragement that follows is an account of the
adventures of Tom Thumb, who of course is a tiny elf who
lives in a Ouija pointer and carries it about on his shoulders
to spell the messages. When the Ouija board is not in use,
Tom Thumb leaves it for an idyllic life outdoors—"When
it is time for me to waken, morning glories ring out their
bells to tell Ouija it is morning . . ." The story of Tom
Thumb's rather insipid days among the flowers is obviously
not harmful in itself; in fact it contains interesting conjec-
ture, intermingled with descriptions of bluebells, about such
questions as the role of magnetism and electricity in moving
the pointer. The problem enters with Nellie and Clarisse,
who, with their willingness to believe every Ouija word as
literal and authoritative truth, have gotten just the nonsense
they deserved. They began their Ouija work with a very
common and unfortunate assumption—that because Ouija
spelled intelligible sentences seemingly outside their own
62 THE OUIJA BOOK

knowledge or control, they could unquestioningly believe

every word as inspired truth from some source above and
beyond them. This is an easy assumption to fall into, since it
is helped along by the wonder and surprise we feel when the
pointer moves and spells words without our conscious
guidance. "But I'm really not doing it! This message must
come from someone bigger and wiser than I!" It's a natural
response and a potentially dangerous one, for while we may
feel special and righteous as the chosen recipient of a great
new revelation, this abnegation of our critical faculties
closes us off from ordinary common sense and can give us
the illusion that "the spirits" rather than we ourselves are
the ones responsible for our actions in the world. Once
we've given up common sense in favor of unquestioning
devotion to voices conveyed by Ouija, the prankster of our
unconscious minds will delight in every imaginary suit of
clothes he can persuade us to parade in. Clarisse and Nellie
don fictitious garments ever more outrageous as their little
book proceeds, from the mild and silly elf stories at the be-
ginning, to the messianic zeal and biblical language of their
final Ouija message: "Verily, verily, I say unto you—sayeth
I, a holy spirit, thou hast at last discovered God's true and
only telegraph to eternity."
Other users of Ouija have parted with common sense when
the departed spirits of famous persons have unexpectedly
put in an appearance at the board; several of these doubtful
messages have even made it into print. One is a syrupy and
half-literate book of trite and repetitious sermons supposedly
delivered to the Ouija board by philosopher William James
—a glance at James' articulate before-death writing will
amply illustrate the hazards of suspending critical judgment
of the board's fruits. Another more entertaining blunder is a
book by psychic investigator Hester Travers Smith, ap-
propriately called Oscar Wilde from Purgatory.
"Spirits" of any description are a potential talking board
hazard because they often appear at the board in such con-
vincingly idiosyncratic and individual fashion, sometimes
 Oracular Hazards 63
offering verifiable facts we think we couldn't possibly have
already known, that it's easy for us to accept their reality
at its most concrete level, and from there believe everything
they tell us as literally true also. Even if we choose to believe
that a once-embodied personality addresses us at the Ouija
table, we have no justification for swallowing whatever the
spirit tells us without so much as raising an eyebrow here or
there. "Stephen," who claimed to be just the sort of spirit
we're now considering, had valuable advice to give on this
subject:

If we accept the fact that physical death does not affect

the identity of the individual, it will be a necessary in-
ference that there are as many intellectual and moral dif-
ferences among spirits as among mortal men.... Beyond
the mere fact, therefore, that spirits live and act (and what
greater fact could we ask? ), the teachings of spirits are
to be received just as we receive those of fallible mortals,
and to be subjected to the test of our own spiritual and
rational powers. Pressed on by influences from all sides,
we are yet to accept or reject them, according to the light
which conscience may shed.

I've found that I can often sidestep the oversimplifications

of literalism by approaching Ouija messages as if they were
dreams. We don't expect the characters and events of a
dream to speak to us in a literal, logical way or to have only
one meaning. My Uncle Jack can be himself in my dream,
carrying on in his usual volatile temper-tantrum style; at the
same time he can represent the angry part of me that I
seldom express directly; he can in the same dream be a
wrathful personification of God berating me for my short-
comings. Just so a "spirit" speaking to us through the Ouija
board can have its reality spread across many possibilities at
once—a little of one metaphor, more of another, maybe a
bit of literal truth too. Ouija messages come to us as dreams
64 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

do, presenting us with inexplicably familiar mysteries as we

watch, relaxed and without judgment, from the windows
of sleep or our seat at the Ouija table. It is only later, when
we wake up or the message has been spelled out, that we
look critically and attempt to unravel some meaning.
The appearance of evil at the Ouija board need alarm us
no more than evil in dreams alarms us. If I dream of falling
down a flight of stairs, I don't assume the dream is telling
me this is about to happen in my waking life. I may be more
than usually careful on stairways the next day; if the dream's
vividness impressed me sufficiently, I may check the steps
leading up to my house for loose boards. Even as I take these
precautions, though, I'm aware that the dream's message
goes beyond this literal level. I don't remain preoccupied
with real stairways, but instead pursue the metaphor of
falling, what the image evokes in me, what it reminds me
of, what associations it leads to. The ambiguity of dreams
helps us see them on many levels at once; the immediacy,
the real physical movement of the pointer, the board's use
of words rather than pictures, all help us to take its mes-
sages literally, to forget that they are layered in metaphor
just as dreams are. Thus we are likely to react to the state-
ment of the board that a close friend is dying of cancer in a
way very different from our reaction to the same message
presented in a dream. We know that in dreams we can die
and still wake up in the morning, that we can kill someone
and then watch them get up and walk away. Ouija messages
come to us from the same darkness our dreams call home.
At the risk of frightening a few people away from the
Ouija board entirely, I'll bring out the most extreme illus-
tration I know of the hazards of Ouija literalism. Jane, an
intelligent older professional woman whose talents and ac-
complishments were in her view (and mine) never fully
appreciated, began to use the Ouija board at an empty, lonely
time in her life. Her closest friend had just died; her career
had hit the doldrums; people near her had disappointed
her. Ouija told Jane that she deserved a far better situation
 Oracular Hazards 65
than the one in which she found herself, and of course Jane
agreed. Since the board's words always amplified her own
perceptions, offered her solace and acknowledged her worth
to a degree no one else did, the game quickly became her
most trusted friend. As her enthusiasm grew, Jane found
she could operate the board and pointer by herself, and soon
she was spending long hours alone with her Ouija "spirits,"
who called themselves by mythological names comfortingly
familiar to Jane from her lifelong study of classical mythol-
ogy. The gods and goddesses of the Ouija board told Jane
that she too was a goddess—and here we've come to the
difficult part of this story. Jane's Ouija voices said her un-
happiness came from trying to live with mere humans when
she really was a goddess. Her troubles would end if she'd
only come and live with the gods. Then the voices accused
her of playing with their confidence—if Jane truly believed
in Ouija spirits, they told her, she should prove it by taking
her gun from the drawer and shooting herself. She did.
It seems that we're back to Gladys Leonard's opening to
this chapter: "You will have nothing to fear from 'evil
spirits' if you have nothing to fear from yourself." And
we're back to my response: fears and weaknesses belong to
every one of us, whether they show themselves in suicidal
tendencies or in simple vanity. This doesn't mean that Ouija
"spirits," real or concocted, have any power over us, nor
does it mean we should drop our boards and run at the first
shady message. Every statement of Ouija we consider "evil" is
attempting to bring us a vital lesson. Even Jane's voices from
the board urging her to kill herself were not evil in
themselves, but were telling her with the strongest possible
metaphors that she desperately needed to begin her life
again, to end an old way of being in the world and find a
new way. Many possible responses were there for Jane to
choose from. She could have been jolted from her self-pity
by the demand for "proof" of her belief, and with the
energy of that jolt she might have taken some constructive
action toward easing her isolation. If she had been willing
66 THE OUIJA® BOOK

to admit at least partial responsibility for the creation of

her voices, she could at least have looked more directly on
her desire to end her life. Jane's use of the board illustrates
an unlikely extension of the twin hazards of the board: read-
ing messages at their most literal level only, and placing
responsibility for the board's words outside ourselves.
We can safely avoid misfortunes both disastrous and triv-
ial at our game boards by cultivating an attitude toward
talking board activities that is a combination of detachment
and responsibility. It sounds (and is) paradoxical, but it is
also effective and simple. Detachment at the start of a session
allows the creatures and concepts of the dark unknown to
move out our fingers into words with little interference
from our conscious minds. So many different voices within
us and without us may be forming the words, and so many
levels of meaning may be possible, that we needn't feel
alarmed or disappointed or especially identified with any-
thing that is spelled. Sorting out meanings can come later.
This act of distancing can also aid in our constant intention
to see beyond the most literal, obvious meaning of a Ouija
message. At the same time we're detaching ourselves from
identification with particular Ouija meanings, we need to
keep in mind our participation in the board's creation—this
also helps us look beyond literal meanings. A spirit may be
sending us a message, but we have sent for the spirit.
Whether creating it in the kettle of our unconscious minds
or calling out through the ether for a nonphysical person-
ality who resonates to our particular needs, it all comes
down in the end to the fact of our responsibility for the
device's words.
By keeping enough distance from the board's words to
allow for many possible meanings, while at the same time
remembering that every message is for and about us, sent
from unknown parts of ourselves, we'll not only avoid the
obstacles we've peered at in evil's cavern, but we'll find
every Ouija session much more valuable. We'll not be easily
disappointed; we will, with a little practice, be able to see
 Oracular Hazards 67
many layers of meaning unfold at once from the words of
Ouija. We can be sure that we won't stumble into Ouija
hazards, by remembering to watch our reactions and ten-
dencies to literalize especially carefully when certain things
happen at the board: when definite personalities, "spirits,"
claim to speak to us; when Ouija flatters us excessively;
when any statement is said to be a revelation or "the only
truth" or a message that only we are privileged to receive;
and especially important, whenever a voice of Ouija tells us
to do anything.
What has become of evil in these pages? We seem to have
gone round it rather than straight through. We've emerged
from the dark cave after having looked at each obstacle we
found there and learned how to avoid it in our future Ouija
explorations. At each obstacle we've paused, asking: "Is this
evil? Is this it? Where does evil live?" And each time we've
had to say: "No, evil doesn't reside in the Ouija board. No,
the prankster is not really evil. No, even spirits who tell us to
commit suicide are only delivering a message we've re-
quested. Evil doesn't find its home in them." We see the
appearance of evil—that's all we can say about it. Could it be
that's all there is?
I bring out this conjecture because our concepts about
evil will affect our experience at the Ouija board. If we
were to believe that evil lived in the talking board pointer, a
diabolical Tom Thumb who could push the pointer about as
he pleased, then our reactions to the oracle's words, and the
words themselves, would take on a very particular flavor and
content. If we believe that, in some way we might never
understand, evil can have no power over us even though we
see the appearance of evil all around, then our scope and
freedom at the Ouija board will broaden considerably, and
we'll use much less of our energy defensively, keeping up
barriers at the gates of the unconscious.
Ouija itself has provided metaphors to help us imagine
how evil might indeed appear to exist, and yet not exist in an
ultimate, indestructible sense. Stephen, the voice of Ouija
68 THE OUIJA® BOOK

we'll hear more from in Chapter Seven, said: "Cold is merely

the absence of heat; darkness the absence of light. Evil is
the nondevelopment of good." You may not go for this; I
myself find that darkness and cold, and evil too, can some-
times feel like very palpable substances. This image can still
help us relax at the Ouija table, though, even if it's laid on
top of a tall belief-pile of images of evil's power and reality.
Another glimmer of light Stephen offers is his emphasis on
Christ's injunction to "resist not evil." This is an idea echoed
by many psychics: our attention to evil, even if that atten-
tion be resistance, creates evil or gives it power. We need
to acknowledge the existence of whatever we see as evil,
give it the right to exist in our universe, see that it has a
message for us, and look in the direction we want to travel
rather than back at the obstacles and fears.
My own Ouija experiments have included many sessions
spent in dialogue with the little board over the nature of
evil. What has emerged is a perspective similar to Stephen's,
in which evil as a conscious power does not exist. Voices I
have received through Ouija have equated evil with ignor-
ance, emphasizing that destructive actions are always ac-
companied by some belief that makes the action seem justi-
fied in the eyes of the evildoer, whether the belief be called
"national security" in the case of the Watergate criminals
or "Aryan superiority" in Nazi Germany or "revenge" for
a jealous lover. Our awareness of such justifications is not
meant to do away with evil or make it less than it is. This
concept does banish evil from its place as a power outside us,
and makes it instead into the force of ignorance, which is
accessible to us and can be changed by us.
The small lanterns we've acquired in this chapter will be
enough to light our way safely through any dark passage
Ouija may open to us, if we only remember to use them,
so we'll leave evil's cavern behind us now and go on to
explore the myriad possible topics Ouija can bring us. I'll
close our discussion of evil with a metaphor from my Ouija,
which can serve as the vehicle taking us from our emphasis
 Oracular Hazards 69

on evil back to a wider perspective in which evil's small

place is apparent in a larger whole.

Ignorance and knowledge are a balancing vine catching

the support and falling away in the wind, again and again.
But the vine always grows.

41
 CHAPTER FIVE

Everything to Do
With Everything

Ouija is not the ground of your beings, nor

the seeds of the new life you bring into the
world, not the constant sun, but water, the
unpredictable nourishes.
-AUTHOR'S OUIJA BOARD, 1977

Almost every user of Ouija I meet has discovered some

novel use for the board, whether it be picking racetrack
winners or supplying missing historical details for a biog-
raphy of the Roman emperor Diocletian. You will un-
doubtedly come upon ways to use Ouija that are not men-
tioned in this book, and that perhaps have never before been
tried. There are so many possibilities that I'll make no at-
tempt to cover them all (I can't even imagine them all).
Instead I'll point out general directions our Ouija explora-
tions can take. I'll map the main rivers of this region and
each of us can raft up whichever of the countless tributaries
attracts us most.
This chapter is a simple geography lesson. We won't con-
cern ourselves here with the river's source or the nature of
70
 Everything to Do With Everything 71

water; we can wonder at a stream that seems to flow uphill,

but we won't search for its secret. We'll learn how to float
in this dark water, how to navigate these most mysterious
of rivers, but we won't be asking why we float or what it is
about the Ouija board that steers us through rapids and
shallows. All these questions will suggest themselves as we
consider such Ouija topics as finding lost objects or predict-
ing future events. We'll just let the "whys" churn about in
our minds for a while, and hope that by the time we arrive
at chapters Eight and Nine, where such questions belong,
answers will have congealed, as does cream into butter.
We'll start with predicting the future, both because it's
an immensely attractive topic and because the last chapter's
precautions, still fresh in our awareness, are crucial to our
understanding and success here more than anywhere else
in our Ouija explorations. A majority of all talking board
disappointments and frights involve predictions made by
the oracle. The pointer may spell out dismal forecasts about
the international political situation, or it may say your best
friend will catch the newest flu strain and die from it next
winter. Many people are frightened away from using Ouija
further - by such gloomy news, especially if any of the
board's predictions actually happen. On the other hand,
many more people give up on the Ouija board when its pre-
dictions don't come true; they feel their time has been
wasted or they've somehow been tricked by unreliable
voices of Ouija.
We'll avoid disappointment and fright, and be on the
way to finding valuable information about the future and
ourselves, by remembering the last chapter's lessons about
the hazards of gullibility and literalism. To learn as much
as possible from Ouija messages about the future, we also
need to understand a bit about how Ouija gets its informa-
tion. Can anyone's voices received through Ouija somehow
really know what will happen two weeks from now? If so,
our wills are not free; we can't change our futures by the
choices we make; the future is determined for us by some
72 THE OUIJA BOOK

force beyond our reach. Determinism is a belief about the

way life works. The other side of the argument, free will,
is also a belief. The debate between them has gone on for
thousands of years and will no doubt continue for thousands
more, because the truth of neither position can ever really
be proven. Maybe free will and determinism do not make
a duality at all, but are both true at once, as so many issues
that seem to be at odds turn out to be when we understand
them more fully (we explored one in the last chapter, the
attitude of simultaneous detachment and responsibility).
Certainly we all experience both sides of this coin in our
day-to-day lives; we sometimes are very aware of destiny's
pull on us, and at other times we feel surrounded by choices
that are ours alone. To our logical minds, there is an im-
possible paradox here. Put logic aside, and the paradox sud-
denly becomes easy to live with, for we all know we have
experienced both free will and determinism as fully true.
Let's take a look, from this newly acquired vantage point,
at Ouija predictions of future events.
If our destinies are determined, the plots of our dramas
already known somewhere, we can assume that with the
Ouija board we may possibly be able to gain access, at times,
to knowledge of future events of our lives or future world-
wide events. This can account for the unlikely details some-
times predicted correctly, the wild improbabilities that
could not have been Ouija guesswork. You know you'd
never buy the yellow sandals Ouija has described as part
of your costume on the summer day you'll meet the love
of your life in Florence, but when your aunt gives you
yellow sandals as a bon voyage gift you begin to look at
the oracle's story in a new light.
Unfortunately, the yellow sandals worn on vacation in
Italy are quite likely to be the only part of the forecast to
materialize as predicted. One reason for this can be seen
in the plethora of influences acting on the Ouija users in
every session, jumbling the message a bit here, exaggerating
there, perhaps letting "yellow sandals" through undistorted
 Everything to Do With Everything 73
because it has no emotional charge, but bringing Ouija users'
present hopes and fantasies into play for a romantic fabri-
cation of the future. Possible influences and sources of dis-
tortion in the present should always be considered when
we ask the board about the future.
The other difficulty involved in predictions of the future
lies in determinism's mirror image, free will. Ouija person-
ality Stephen puts it bluntly: "It is because your wills are
free that fortune-telling is futile." Even though we're assum-
ing, from our limited experience, that there is a course laid
out for us to follow through this life, we are also assuming,
based again on experience, that we can change our course
at any time by choices we make. In almost any forecast,
many particular choices made by many different people are
necessary to assure the predicted outcome; one different
decision made by just one person in the time that elapses
between the prediction and its manifestation can be enough
to change the look of the future entirely.
What good is fortune-telling, then, if it isn't really pos-
sible? Its greatest value may lie in what it can tell us about
the present. Assuming that environmental influences on the
board's behavior are for the moment minimal, the little
board's assessment of the future remains the product of a
complex distillation of innumerable factors belonging to
past and present, factors too many, too complicated, and
too close to us for us to be able to sift them all together
consciously and arrive at predictions as insightful as the
board's. When we sit at the Ouija table and ask about the
future, we can imagine this process set into motion: every-
thing both Ouija users know of the past and present situation
is considered, and all possibly relevant details are collected
and set apart where they can be weighed and played with
and rearranged into various combinations. Our feelings
about the matter in hand are brought out into view, our
hopes and fears and desires. The master plan of our des-
tinies is consulted. Half-formed fantasies we may harbor
about this future are paraded out of their hiding places and
74 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

added to the now substantial collection of contributing

factors. The hopes and fears and destinies of other people
involved in this particular future are found somewhere, or at
the least the projections of Ouija players' hopes and fears are
located. The unexpected, the paradoxical, the improbable
ironic twist of events are all taken into account. From all
this and perhaps more, a single future is distilled and its out-
lines spelled out at the Ouija board. The whole process may
take place in a matter of seconds.
What we finally receive is a forecast of the most probable
future at the time we consult Ouija. Five minutes from now
the same question may merit a different prediction. In two
days we may approach the question itself in a different style.
The board's statements about the future reflect back on the
present in which they are made. If we remember this we'll
be less concerned about whether or not a Ouija forecast
comes true, and we'll find more in those forecasts than little
tests of the oracle's powers.
It's generally true that the less we "test" Ouija for psychic
powers of any variety, the more valuable and interesting our
results with it will be. Psychic phenomena just don't seem
responsive to the usual scientific methods of investigation, as
researchers in what's now called parapsychology are quickly
finding out. Darby and Joan, Ouija users who brought
"Stephen" into communication with this world, attempted
for a while to receive verifiable evidence of Stephen's life
before "graduation" (his term for death). They concluded
that "the more one sought evidence the more trivial were
the messages received." This brings us to another reason for
my repeated recommendation that we look for many layers
of meaning in each Ouija message: such a sidelong approach
to the sometimes fickle psychic realm actually assures more
successful results than does a straightforward attempt.
When we are prepared to read the board's predictions for
the future as metaphors about the present, we increase our
odds on receiving accurate predictions. Perhaps we've
stumbled into a universal principle of perversity here, the
 Everything to Do With Everything 75
same one that's at work when you try unsuccessfully to
coax your toddler into saying in front of company the new
word he's been repeating over and over all day. Whatever
the reason, it's true that especially when we advance into
more obviously psychic areas we'll do better if we turn our
gaze a bit to one side and at least pretend, but hopefully
really believe, that we're not looking for anything in
particular.
All our activities with the Ouija board have a psychic
component, in that there is always something beyond the
physical and the known and the explainable at work in the
pointer's movements. The areas I'm calling most obviously
psychic are those topics that not only involve unknown
parts of our minds and psyches, but seem to involve forces
larger than our individual beings. Fortune-telling is one such
area. Another one especially suitable for Ouija board exper-
imentation is telepathy, sending messages from person to
person by means of thought alone.
A gentle way to begin telepathic explorations with the
board is to ask the board what some absent friend is doing,
rather than jumping into the friend's head and asking for
her thoughts. Pick people for whom you feel a strong
emotional tie, as this will help, and elicit as much detail as
you can from Ouija: what is your friend wearing? where
is she? what colors and objects surround her? are other
people present? in what sort of mood does your traveling
Ouija find her? Be sure to note the time and write down
all the board's clues. Then compare your oracular version
of your friend's activities with her own. Especially if your
Ouija account was well furnished with detail, some of it is
apt to be correct, and often the least likely bits and pieces.
Remember that the "untrue" parts of the message can be
just as valuable for you as the true parts, and give your
attention to them accordingly.
My unprovable but nevertheless firm opinion is that there
is really no danger here of intruding on anyone's privacy.
If for any reason I don't want a particular person to know
76 THE OUIJA BOOK

by extrasensory means what I'm doing or thinking, I auto-

matically create a barrier around myself, like static blocking
radio reception, that keeps out that unwanted perception. I
don't have to consciously imagine such a barrier; I don't
even have to know anyone is trying to read my thoughts.
My friend Rob and I were surprised recently when we
asked, via Ouija, whether his wife Nan might be ready to
consider reconciliation. (She had moved out three months
earlier in an energetically furious state of mind, and had
refused to speak with Rob since.) The pointer had been
strolling casually about the board to answer our previous
questions, but as soon as we mentioned Nan the little piece
of plastic took off. It jerked and skidded across the board
as if it were being thrown with somebody's full force. After a
few minutes it seemed to have calmed down enough to
spell; it made its statement quickly and then shot off the
end of the board. The pointer had spelled "Stop meddling
with me." We did. It's a good idea, as a matter of etiquette,
to include a request for permission from the person whose
thoughts or actions we are about to probe just before we
ask Ouija for information about them. If we're going to
assume for the moment that communication of another's
thoughts to us through the Ouija board is possible, we may
as well also assume that our thoughts can reach that other
person, at least on an unconscious level. Asking permission
will thus assure the person questioned that our intentions
are honorable and we don't want to harm them. It also
reminds us that we can't receive any information anyway
without the other's permisson. Besides these fine reasons,
there's often laughter to be found in the improbable cour-
tesy of "May I read your thoughts?"
Ouija telepathy is a river with many tributaries. You may
want to arrange experiments in communication more con-
scious than simply listening in on someone's thoughts. A
friend across town, or across thousands of miles, can sit
down to think to you at exactly the time you hold your
Ouija session. You may want to attempt a Ouija
 Everything to Do With Everything 77
conversation, with simultaneous Ouija sessions in different
places. Some players receive interesting communications
from sleeping persons. You can even try interspecies
telepathy, though verification will present a challenge. I've
gotten surprising and sensible answers to such questions as
"What would my dog Kiffy want to say to me if he could
speak?" ("Stop laughing at me—it hurts my feelings") or,
"Do any of the garden plants have something to say?"
("We broccoli would like you to mulch us.") Perhaps
you're beginning to see that the possibilities are endless.
Mention of advice from my garden plants points out the
little board's usefulness in practical, everyday affairs. I did
mulch the broccoli on the strength of the board's sugges-
tion; for matters of greater consequence I would be sure to
find additional' opinions before acting. In many mundane
matters, though, following the board's suggestions can't
possibly cause any harm, and may be very helpful in saving
us time and energy or bringing an important oversight to
our attention. I've found the Ouija board especially useful
for finding lost objects around the house. Almost every day I
misplace something crucial, and though I can't remember
where I last saw the whatever-it-is, I know that really I
know; I was the one to set it down and then put a pile of
something else on top of it. Ouija can often bring the loca-
tion of the missing object back up to conscious awareness
—unless I really don't want to remember, in which case the
board may be able to tell me why I don't want to.
Ouija can also tell us about invisible characteristics of
objects we do have in hand. This is a standard practice in
the psychic repertoire and is called psychometry. A person
sensitive to receiving such information from objects can
hold in her hand an object with a long history, an heirloom
brooch or maybe a Chinese jade elephant, and tell us who
owned it when, where it has been, what emotional dramas
the person who owned it took part in, etc. The Ouija board
can amplify our latent talents in this area. We can hold
or touch an appropriately old or experienced object, or set
78 THE OUIJA® BOOK

it on the Ouija board if it is small enough, and watch its

story unfold.
I was introduced to this possibility one evening when I
agreed to sit in on a session of two friends using Ouija.
Walt and Irene had been using the board regularly for sev-
eral months with steadily improving results, until that week,
when the pointer had begun to slide off the board into Irene's
lap almost every time she touched it. They couldn't get the
pointer to stay on the board long enough for it to tell them
what was going on, and when Walt and I tried, it simply
scooted off the board in Irene's direction. Irene insisted she
had no secrets to divulge, and no sudden changes in her life
that week. I asked her if she always wore her jewelry for
the sessions—three rings and countless silver bangles on her
left hand, two more rings and a heavy silver and turquoise
Navajo bracelet on the right—yes she did. Still, all that
jewelry intrigued me, as it did whenever I saw Irene, so I
asked her to take off one piece at a time and set each one
down on the Ouija board, as Walt and I sat with the pointer
under our fingers. My request really had little or no "psy-
chic flash" to it; I was merely providing entertainment for
my eyes, while my attention wandered over my plans for
the next day. I was jolted back to the present by a sudden
buzz, almost like a mild electric shock, in my fingertips.. I
looked down as the pointer began to spin circles about the
heavy Navajo bracelet, knocking rings and silver circles out
of its path and onto the floor. With Irene and Walt back
at the board and the bracelet enthroned on the word Ouija,
the pointer began a long tale of the bracelet's maker, a
Navajo whose name jumbled into a different nonsense syl-
lable at each of the pointer's attempts to spell it. According
to Ouija, when this man had died a week before, he had
immediately set out to find this particular bracelet. Of all
the hundreds of pieces of jewelry he had made, he had kept
this one bracelet for almost twenty years—until it was
stolen. To the end of his life he wondered what had become
of it. Unfortunately, Ouija wasn't able to trace the brace-
 Everything
Everything to Do With 79
let's path from the time it left its creator to the day it
attached itself to Irene's arm, probably because none of its
subsequent owners had a strong emotional link to the brace-
let. Irene, enthusiastic and voluble on any occasion and es-
pecially so on this night, apparently convinced the bracelet's
maker that she would be an appreciative and appropriate heir
to it, for Walt and Irene's Ouija sessions have continued
smoothly since then and Irene always wears the bracelet.
We seem to have turned again into mysterious Ouija
waters, after a brief paddle up the stream called "Ouija
Board Household Hints." That's how it is in this country—
even the most ordinary shallow trickles we can find lead
quickly to roaring rivers so dark we can't see their depth. We
may as well go on into the mystery. Perhaps the most
thoroughly baffling area for Ouija exploration is the matter
of communicating with spirits (or nonphysical entities, or
now "dead" but once living people). We've already taken a
look at problems and considerations peculiar to this topic
in the last two chapters. We've seen the difficulties the
spirits claim to experience in reaching us, and we've become
well acquainted with the dangers of accepting any spirit's
reality or messages at their most literal level only. Now
we're prepared to remember that spirits may not be all
metaphor; there just might be a speck of real spook to them
after all.
It's especially frustrating to search for Ouija spirits.
So many variables are involved in bringing their communi-
cation across to us—twice as many different factors as in
Ouija messages from parts of ourselves, since the spirits are
persons as complex and variable as we are—that the most
we can do if we want to communicate with nonphysical
beings is to keep an attitude of openness and welcome to-
ward them. If we are open to their presence at the Ouija
board, nonphysical entities will tune in on us sooner or
later. Of course, if we don't want such communication,
that too is automatically clear to any spirits wandering past
our boards, and we'll be left in peace. We can detect any
80 THE OUIJA® BOOK

attempts at spirit communication by periodically asking

Ouija who is speaking to us, and following up any definite or
unusual replies with further questioning about the
speaker's identity. Fascinating stories often emerge, bringing
details of life in a medieval nunnery or tales of nomadic
adventure in the Far East of two thousand years past. Occa-
sionally there will be spelled out a more recent life story
that can be checked against a town's birth records for its
authenticity. Inconsistencies and contradictions within a
story are common and simply show that some parts of the
communication are coming through with distortion; don't
give up because of these slips. And remember that whether
you are subconsciously making up the board's story or re-
ceiving the words of an autonomous being, the message
spelled out is for you and reflects your cares and wishes and
eccentricities. The involvement of a "spirit" in replies from
Ouija does not lessen our participation in and creation of the
pointer's words. It simply adds another dimension of
meaning to those words.
I've already mentioned the possibility of delving into past
and future lives with the Ouija board. If you haven't yet
tried it, please do, as this area tends to be one of the most
responsive to Ouija exploration. One useful approach is to
ask for information on whatever past life is the biggest in-
fluence on your present life, or whichever lifetime you can
learn most from now. It can also be interesting to search
out past life connections with your present family and
friends; whether or not your mother really was your
husband last time around, the statement may lead to im-
portant insights about the nature of your relationship with
her now. Again I'll say, remember the many layers of
meaning in every message—and especially when asking
about future lives, remember that the replies are always
possibilities, not inevitable truths.
Last chapter we found it helpful to consider the ways the
board's words are like dreams—their mystery and mixed
metaphors, their habit of speaking to and from many of
 Everything to Do With Everything 81
our parts at once. We guessed that Ouija messages and
dreams may have a common source, or at least that their
sources overlap at important points. Because of these simi-
larities, our dreams make a fine starting place for Ouija
inquiry. The Ouija board can often help us remember the
night's adventures by spelling out a dream's main images or
themes—this works especially easily when we already re-
member at least one image (or sound or smell or color or
feeling) from the dream. One morning my dreams left only
the memory of a hard orange color surrounded by blue.
That evening when I asked Ouija to elucidate, it spelled out
"orange rock in ocean," and suddenly I recalled the experi-
ence of clinging to the orange rock in a turquoise sea while
over my right shoulder I watched the approach of a gigantic
wave.
Once Ouija has delivered the dream's memory to us, we
can go on to explore its meanings. Since Ouija often speaks
to us in dream language anyway, with metaphors and stories
rather than abstract concepts, its explanations of our dreams
are often oblique, piling metaphor upon metaphor, rarely
offering the simplicity of traditional approaches to dream
analysis. Even if we're familiar with the terminology, we're
not likely to receive "The rock is your ego, the ocean the
unconscious; you are afraid your ego will be submerged in
the power of the unconscious." Our Ouija voices are too
close to the dream to tolerate such deadeningly unimagina-
tive interpretations, however true they may be. We're more
likely to receive another story, another dream to compare
with the first: "Driving a country road, you come up over a
hill and see that not far ahead the road ends at a precipice.
The cars before you haven't seen this and are sailing over
the cliff as they reach it. You can't see past the cliff nor
hear the cars crash anywhere below." Or Ouija will ask
questions of us: "What do you feel as the wave approaches?
When it reaches your rock, what do you do?" Or the Ouija
pointer may continue the dream as it did for me: "You hold
fast to the rock as the wave crashes over you, and after a
 @
82 THE OUIJA BOOK
few seconds you realize you can still breathe. You open
your eyes and find yourself in a vast underwater tunnel,
blue-black water swirling about you and a voice, or the
echo of a voice, beckoning you from far ahead." This is not
dream interpretation so much as it is open-ended explora-
tion of our psyches, using dreams and Ouija as a double
diving board into the unknown. We may learn about the
meanings of our dreams in this manner; we're guaranteed
to learn about much more as well.
Such an approach to dreams suggests many untried possi-
bilities for using Ouija as a tool in exploring that psychic
river most often navigated by therapists and every sort of
"
mental health" professional. One psychologist of my ac-
quaintance is actually experimenting with the Ouija board
in her individual counseling sessions, though she is for now
an anomaly among her more traditional colleagues, who
continue to scoff at such "childish" methods. Dr. Thacker
(not her real name, of course) has constructed her own
rather antiseptic-looking board and pointer for her own
use, in order to avoid some of the "occult" and "spooky"
associations the Ouija board suggests. She tells me she some-
times uses the tool with clients as an alternative to hypnosis;
deep-buried memories can surface through skillful work
with the images and messages the pointer brings, and the
method has the advantage of operating while the client re-
mains in a normal waking state of consciousness.
It's easy to see the board's possibilities as a therapeutic
tool, whether used within the therapist/client relationship or
as an individual aid to purposeful introspection: it simply
gives a voice to whatever is unconscious in us. Giving voice
to the unconscious is a small beginning to the potentially
complicated process of psychic growth and integration, but it
is a beginning sometimes hard to find. Ouija could be a
valuable timesaving tool here.
Whatever the psychic depth we seek, Ouija can lead us
down. We can start with questions about the unknown
areas of our present lives: what is my motivation for this
 Everything to Do With Everything 83

sudden desire to change jobs? Where does my vague anxiety

come from? What do I really want? Such motivation-
probing questions can bring us useful insights and help us
move into more fulfilling lives. If we want to look further,
those questions can lead to others more obscure and com-
plicated. When I try to find what it is I really want, Ouija
may highlight my need to ask that question by presenting
two or three conflicting goals I carry about with me at
once. Deeper probing may reveal that one set of goals was
formulated by my mother, another by me as a reaction
against my mother's goals, and the third by some part of
myself still a stranger to my days. From here Ouija could
carry me back to events in my childhood that illuminate
the beginnings of my adoption of my mother's goals, the
beginnings of rebellion, and the origin and nature of that
third area of ambition I harbor. Remembrance of significant
or traumatic childhood events can be evoked at the Ouija
board the same way we evoke the memory of dreams, one
small image sparking a chain of many more.
The main difficulty we may encounter working with
these emotionally charged, potentially very powerful images
and memories is that we may not know what to do with
them once we've dredged them up. We may feel over-
whelmed; or stuck in unhappy patterns, or in some other
way unable to integrate this new information positively into
the persons we are now. Often Ouija itself will prevent our
overdose on introspection by stopping short its revelations
before we feel too exposed. We don't need to depend on
the board's discretion, though, to feel safe in these turbulent
waters, if we follow a few simple procedures here. First,
it's especially important to write down every Ouija response
and every question just as it's asked. Second, go slowly. If
you feel a little shaky after a session because Ouija triggered
"forgotten" memories about how you wanted to kill your
younger brother when he arrived in this world, don't take the
subject any further in a Ouija session until you've settled
down about it a bit. My third suggestion is an obvious
84 THE OUIJA BOOK

one: your partner is crucial in such an endeavor. A trusted,

empathetic Ouija partner can make a lot of difference both
in how deep you'll be willing to dive into the unknown, and
in how well you'll be able to use what you bring back. Last,
but as important as ever: Don't literalize the board's gifts
or make hasty conclusions. Ouija approaches our pasts
and our psyches as if they were dreams; the information it
tosses up on our shores has many meanings and comes
from many different depths. Here is where written records
of the board's words become useful. We can look back at
replies from many sessions and see the common threads
of meaning running through separate stories,
remembered events, metaphors that, at the time they were
received, seemed to refer to nothing at all.
As we unravel our psychic knots, uncover hidden motiva-
tions and make the acquaintance of hitherto unknown parts
of ourselves, Ouija can do more than provide raw material
for us to chew and digest. At any point along the way, we
can ask for advice or direction from Ouija about what to
do with the bits and pieces of insight it brings us. Of course
these suggestions require critical appraisal of their worth.
Even so, allowing for the usual Ouija quirks and jokes, we'll
find much of the little board's advice helpful and imagina-
tive. This is hardly surprising considering that in this area
we're really giving advice to and from ourselves. The parts
of us we're not consciously aware of are themselves aware
of our conscious parts—they can therefore see a more com-
prehensive picture of our situation than our conscious minds
alone can glimpse, and are likely, assuming undisturbed
Ouija communication, to give good advice.
The same principle applies when we turn our attention
from the mind's condition to the body's health. Ouija can
give us access to all sorts of information about our physical
beings that we usually must guess at from the clues our
inarticulate aches and pains provide. The unique advantages
of Ouija diagnosis and advice in this realm are numerous:
the board can respond to physical warning signals so subtle
 Everything to Do With Everything 85

we may not even be consciously aware of them; advice is

completely individual, not determined by a set formula
that says symptoms A + B = ailment C that requires treat-
ment D; and furthest of all from usual medical practice,
Ouija doesn't look only at our physical beings, but includes in
its examinations everything within its extraordinary reach. Of
course I don't advise simply replacing the family doctor
with Ouija. The oracle's best use is as a supplement to tradi-
tional medical advice, as a way to catch minor ailments that
don't need professional treatment, and as an instrument for
going beyond the limits of medical science. Here, as in
every Ouija tributary, we need to take our common sense
along and use it freely.
I began consulting Ouija with medical problems as a last
resort. The winter of 1974 found me suffering the
daily pain of rheumatoid arthritis, which affected almost all
my joints to the point that walking pained my feet and
my hands were too stiff and weak for such routine
movements as using a can opener. I'd already been to many
doctors, including leading specialists in the treatment of
arthritis, and the very best I'd been offered was the
possibility of maintaining my present level of pain and
disability while adding the side effects of the drugs used for
treatment. The Ouija board offered no such dismal forecast,
but no promise of cure either, nor any astounding new
miracle treatment. What it did provide was daily advice and
encouragement, with real sympathy and no trace of
condescension, and, finally, an attention to all factors
making up the disease and my response to it: emotional,
nutritional, psychic and mental as well as physical. The
board's approaches were myriad. I received detailed advice
about diet, with complete menus and instructions for
vitamin supplements. Before starting the board's regimen, I
looked for confirmation of the soundness of this advice,
and found that many of the suggestions of Ouija were
echoed by the few nutritionally-aware doctors I could
find, and by recent reports of nutritional healing as it is
practiced in Europe. A few of the
86 THE OUIJA BOOK
board's suggestions were mirrored only in the newest, still
highly experimental data derived from tests with arthritic
mice, such as the little board's insistence that I increase my
copper intake. Ouija said I needed more of this mineral
because "copper conducts electricity from cell to cell."
I was instructed to walk for several hours every day,
which I did even though at first each step was painful, as
the joints of my feet and ankles were swollen with excess
synovial fluid. Some Ouija sessions were spent delving into
the psychosomatic aspects of the illness, and ways were
suggested for me to deal with it on an emotional level. Some
days Ouija told funny allegorical stories. Many times I was
simply admonished to love myself, or to concentrate on the
ways I was already healthy rather than on the sickness. I
found this exercise especially helpful:
When you awaken each morning, lie in bed and look for
your health. Find whatever feels healthy and put your
attention there. Feel the light and energy moving through
your body. Give your attention totally to the health that is
here now for five minutes. Remember this feeling at
moments of rest throughout the day. Repeat for five min-
utes before sleep at night.
Though I don't credit Ouija with the complete recovery
that followed—I don't mean to even faintly suggest that the
board itself has any curative powers—my experience illus-
trates one case in which the little board proved a more
effective medical adviser than any properly credentialed
M.D. Before you venture into this area with your Ouija
board, be sure to take a good look at your beliefs about
health and medicine. If Ouija diagnosis sounds crazy or
dangerous to you, then you very likely would create trouble
for yourself by attempting to use it.
If you want to ease into a Ouija exploration of the body's
wisdom gradually, I suggest nutrition as a starting place.
Ouija can be an ideal nutritionist, since we each have unique
nutritional needs, and who could know those needs more
 Everything to Do With Everything 87
intimately than our own unconscious selves? I make a habit
of asking Ouija periodically about my nutritional needs,
because I find that, at least according to my oracle, those
needs can change quickly and drastically. Laurel used the
board's advice to lose extra pounds; though she had tried
many diets and heard of many more, Ouija brought sugges-
tions Laurel hadn't heard of, suggestions that worked be-
cause they were individually created for and from the one
who knows best what Laurel needs.
The fields of medicine, nutrition and psychology could
all become fascinating streams for Ouija experimentation
by open-minded people with special expertise in those fields.
All of a doctor's specialized knowledge and vocabulary
would be available to the pointer, making possible an exact-
ness in the body's communication that those of us without
such knowledge would be less likely to reach. This is true
of any field requiring specialized knowledge. A physicist
at the Ouija board might receive information about how the
pointer moves, spelled out in terminology more precise and
illuminating than our everyday vocabulary can manage.
Whatever your work or field of interest, it brings an added
richness to your Ouija sessions, and Ouija will return this
richness by sparking new ideas and reflecting imaginative
perspectives back on your field of interest. You may even,
as I once did when I sat at the Ouija table in a particularly
domestic mood, find yourself copying down unusual new
recipes to try, straight from the board's kitchen. Here's
one, for an excessively healthful candy that provides all the
B vitamins in doses larger than you'll find anywhere. I've
come to call it Goo Ball:
Mix together equal parts peanut butter, honey, and nu-
tritional yeast. Add raisins or nuts if desired. Make into
balls and roll balls in coconut.

In every one of these Ouija rivers, we are exploring our

own creativity, in and around and through whatever else
we're doing with the alphabet and pointer. We're discovering
88 THE OUIJA BOOK

the widths and depths and whirlpools of energy that

express themselves through us with the inevitability and
natural grace of a bubbly overflowing spring. The idea of
being creative is often spoken of as if it were a subject in
itself, something one is or is not; our Ouija explorations can
give us the experience of creating in many different areas
and styles, and can show us that creating is what we all do,
already, in the daily living of our lives. Ouija has had much
to say to me about creativity—I'll let it emphasize my point
here:
Creation is not a solemn affair, as you like to pretend in
order to make yourselves feel more important. Rather it
is what you do moment by moment when you are not
interfering with yourselves. Your task is to make conscious
your creative process without losing it. Then you will
truly be creating your own lives and, collectively, the life
of the universe, in ways which are infinitely variable yet
always within the web of cooperation that links all mani-
festations of life.
For me, this awareness—that what we call creativity is
simply the process of becoming conscious of what we al-
ready are doing—has been one of Ouija's most valuable
lessons. So many of us believe we're "just not creative."
When we find ourselves spelling out imaginative stories,
insightful advice, even clever pranks at the Ouija board, we
begin to realize we are creative after all. The secret lies in
the ability to bring the turmoil of words and ideas up to
conscious awareness, and with Ouija we have been devel-
oping exactly that ability. Laurel tells me that what she
values most from all she has gathered in her Ouija explora-
tions is confidence. Once she saw how tremendously crea-
tive she was with the little board, and realized Ouija merely
gave her access to what was already there, somewhere,
Laurel felt confident enough to go on writing creatively on
her own.
 Everything to Do With Everything 89

There are many ways we can use Ouija to specifically

encourage our creative action in all areas of our lives. We've
considered the usefulness of Ouija in giving us advice on
personal problems or relationships. This advice is so useful,
and often so unusual too, precisely because it is creative; it
rises spontaneously from unknown parts of us, flipping our
perception so that the problems we brought to the board
become vehicles for the creative expression of our unique
and powerful dramas. Problems are problems, after all, be-
cause we're stuck in them. The old ways of getting through
the situation aren't working; what's needed is a new per-
spective, one that has not existed for us before and that we
must create. Any area of our lives where we're feeling un-
satisfied and believe we don't know what to do can be
fertile ground for Ouija watering. A married couple I know,
finding their relationship drifting in the doldrums, went so
far as to ask Ouija for suggestions about improving their
sex life. They received very explicit directions, which in-
corporated fantasies and needs they both were only dimly
aware of and would have been too embarrassed to suggest
on their own. They created, at the Ouija board, a painless
and fun way through what could have become a major
obstacle to their growth together.
Now that we see how creativity is not one subject but the
living essence of all we do, we can look at ways Ouija can aid
in those areas traditionally labeled "creative" or "artistic."
Since the board's medium is words, it is perhaps most directly
helpful with writing, though I've also used it successfully as an
aid to visual art projects and other sorts of creative work.
First, we can come to Ouija knowing we want to work on
some project but not knowing where to begin; the oracle can
give us ideas, images, even little practice exercises geared
exactly to our needs. When I wanted to start painting after a
break of several years, Ouija gave me small, not-too-
threatening "assignments" for a few weeks to help me regain
confidence and keep with it in that awkward period before
the process acquires its own momentum.
90 THE OUIJA BOOK

Laurel received similar directions for writing when she

needed them, unusual short exercises meant to get her going
and broaden the range of what she believed she could do
with writing. One day Ouija told her to write a story in
the form of a grocery list. The next day she was told to take
an actual grocery list and use its contents metaphorically as
the basis of a short explanation of the workings of the
universe. For a more ambitious assignment, we followed the
pointer's directions and tape-recorded one of our con-
versations; then Ouija directed Laurel to take that conver-
sation and use it word for word in a story, while creating a
completely different context around the words. We can
look at Ouija as a personal teacher in these waters, and we'll
gain even more confidence and ease with the creative work
we begin by knowing that this teacher is actually a part of us.
Once we're at work on our own we can return to Ouija
when we run aground on a sandbar in the river or lose our
bearings in a wide lake. The larger perspective Ouija often
brings in such cases, and the reassurance that we are indeed
moving with some purpose, can be invaluable. I consulted
Ouija in a floundering spirit several times during the early
stages of this book; you can judge for yourself how helpful
it may have been. Often a general reassurance from the
board and a reminder to relax a bit are enough to send us
back to our writing desks or easels knowing we can go on.
Sometimes, though, Ouija has offered me very specific sug-
gestions about what to do next, what topic to focus on,
even what title I might want to use (though, alas, I've
coaxed nothing so specific from Ouija concerning this
book).
We can even write stories, poems, songs and plays at the
Ouija board, without consciously composing a single word.
Pearl Curran, a Missouri housewife, received dozens of
volumes of fiction and poetry this way from Patience
Worth, a personality of Ouija. (We'll hear more about her
in Chapter Seven.) I've received essays and parables, and
occasionally the words to a song that all present were then
 Everything to Do With Everything 91
requested, by the Ouija board, to sing. My current Ouija
project is a suspenseful mystery novel, copied down word by
word as the pointer spells out a complex, quickly moving
drama with many characters and rich detail. I never have any
idea what will happen next—I don't even know what the
next word will be. This sort of Ouija creation is
often accompanied by an eery feeling that whatever work is
being spelled out at the board already exists somewhere out
there in the void in finished form; our job with the
board and pointer is merely a matter of taking dictation.
I'm fascinated by this feeling and have a hunch that it's an
important clue, telling us we're receiving a message with
very little distortion (though not telling us anything about
where the message comes from).
The first time my Ouija board spelled out an entire essay
was an overwhelming experience for me. Laurel and I had
asked "What is the connection between sexuality and spiri-
tuality?" We certainly didn't expect any particular sort of
answer, but when the pointer immediately spelled out a
title, an introduction, and seven section headings, we were
amazed. Where did all this come from? How could it pos-
sibly exist before it was spelled out at the Ouija board, as
seemed to be the case? The entire essay took six weeks of
Ouija sessions to complete; it contains 2,000 words, all in-
dividually spelled out at the board. The title given by Ouija
for the whole production is "The Universe in You: Sugges-
tions for Sexual Syncopation." Here is one section that
consists of an exercise I find very useful:
The Smile of a Natural Animal
Find yourself alone in a comfortable and private place
with a mirror. Smile. Smile on, and think as you watch
yourself smile of all the smiles you smile each day. How
does that feel? Most likely terrible. This is not the expres-
sion of good will or pleasure, but of fear of one sort or
another. Realize now that your beliefs about pleasure are
most certainly distorted, are in fact distorted to the degree
92 THE OUIJA- BOOK
to which you felt terrible in the above exercise. Think on
this for a moment. The margin of doubt you have just
acquired will be very helpful to you in experiencing
pleasure at the innocent and intense level of the natural
animal.
Now, consider the amorphous environment around you,
not the objects and feelings connected to them, but such
important commonplaces as heat, constriction of clothing
on your body, or the feel of the surface you sit or lie on.
Imagine you are suspended in sea brine or a gravity-free
chamber. Lie down. Take off your clothes or loosen them.
Relax and imagine a waterfall flooding through you, taking
with it all your tensions and unnecessary or insincere
smiles. Watch the waterfall until you are empty of all
thoughts and feelings, with only the awareness of your
glistening body in the focus of that powerful water's
movement. Think on whatever aspect of your creatureli-
ness you feel best about, not what any others value, such
as the smoothness of skin or shapely elbows, but whatever
brings you the fullest sense of bodily joy and health. Feel
this joy and well-being spread to every cell of your body,
to those parts that are ill or unloved by you in your usual
day-to-day reality. Feel the one integral whole which is
you in the body. Know that the spread of health and joy
through every cell is not metaphor but solemn physical
truth. Concentrate on the joyful song of your body until
you can feel the singing in every part of you, until you
are pulsating harmoniously. Then, without interrupting
your awareness of the music, look again in your mirror.
There—the smile of a natural animal.
Just as the exploration of any Ouija river teaches us about
our creativity, any use of Ouija will also broaden and
deepen our awareness of our psychic powers. Few of us
believe we're sensitive to receiving information in extra-
sensory ways, just as few of us believe we're creative. The
board's first influence here is to show us what we already
 Everything to Do With Everything 93

know, and so give us more confidence in our psychic abilities

and enable us to see such abilities as ordinary and no longer
spooky. Most of the areas we've considered in this chapter
involve some mode of receiving information that goes
beyond what we think of as the usual range of our senses. As
we come to accept these ways of knowing as natural, which
happens automatically as we proceed in our Ouija
exploration, our psychic abilities will begin to stretch and
unfold into the space we've provided for them. Ouija can
become a valuable tool for us to use in expanding our
psychic abilities, as it takes each of us at our own speed into
exactly those areas in which we have most latent ability.
This is a natural self-regulating process that happens as we
use the Ouija board; we don't need to concentrate on it,
nor even to be aware of it except to notice the changes in
us from time to time. We'll look at psychic development
in detail in the very last chapter, considering then the ways
the Ouija board can take us beyond its capabilities alto-
gether, into the realms of trance mediumship or other ways
of directly receiving extrasensory information.
Your facility in navigating Ouija waterways that I've
pointed out in this geography lesson will improve with
experience. Nevertheless, a few of my suggestions are likely
to remain dry streambeds no matter how many times you
look for them. Others will open up talents you never knew
were there; you may discover Ouija swamps and whirlpools I
haven't even imagined. Remember that whatever is spelled has
some meaning, even if it's not the meaning you thought you
were looking for. You may have landed in the middle of an
unknown Ouija river; stay with it and see where it takes
you.
 CHAPTER SIX

The Oracle's Origins

The spirit of the law is unchanged and un-

changeable, but the letter progresses with
civilization's advance.
-MARGARET CAMERON, 1918

Though Mr. Fuld may have thought his design of the

Ouija board an original one, it had actually been in use at least
2,500 years before he capitalized on it. In a form almost
identical to the modern Ouija, the talking board was an
integral part of Pythagoras' famed school of philosophy in
the Greece of 540 B.C.:
The brotherhood held frequent seances or circles
at which a mystic table, moving on wheels, moved
toward signs inscribed on the surface of a stone slab on
which the moving table worked.
The participants gathered in a circle about the stone slab;
whether or not they touched the moving table with their
fingers as modern-day users of Ouija do is not clear from the
accounts left us. In any case, the process was taken very
seriously by those privileged to participate, and the answers
given were interpreted for their prophetic value and for the
94
 T h e Or a c le ' s O r ig in s 9 5
Pythagoras himself did not invent the intriguing apparatus,
but brought the idea back from his travels in the East. We
can only guess at the board's earlier history. Its use may go
back several thousand more years, and its true beginnings will
no doubt remain a mystery.
Since Pythagoras' day, the talking board and countless
variations on it have been discovered and forgotten many
times over. Though the device itself has changed very little,
its accessibility has broadened so remarkably that Pythago-
ras would scarcely recognize today's Ouija board.
Pythagoras' "circle" was a very select one, as were other
groups of philosophers, rulers, or priests who used methods
similar to Ouija. Many times the secret belonged to a single
priest/ruler, and often the apparatus itself was considered
magical, somehow containing within it the source of the
knowledge it imparted. You or I, living in such times, would
most likely not even know of the existence of these oracles. If
we had heard of them, we might be inclined to consider their
proprietors very powerful and holy—it would certainly
never occur to us that we could ourselves construct a stone
slab and a table on wheels and have the same power and
knowledge available to us.
The rise of Christianity in Europe meant an official end to
this sort of magic; if the board's use survived at all it
remained a well-kept secret. And later, when the Church's
hold began to loosen to secular powers and Science and
Reason gained influence, they proved just as efficient deter-
rents. To the Church, the talking board represented the
devil; to the scientists it was superstition and silliness. In
either case, the ruling classes were dissuaded from the prac-
tice of such barbarian rituals—which opened the way, of
course, for barbarians, and everyone else whose conduct was
not considered very important. So the board's next appear-
ance was on a scale much broader than ever before and
touching many more people's lives.
We'll focus on Europe here, and eventually the United
States, because it was out of the Western cultural milieu,
western Europe and the U.S. in particular, that the talking
96 THE OUIJA@ BOOK
board as we know it today emerged. Instruments similar to
Ouija were and are used in many other parts of the world,
and as we have seen, the oracle probably originated in the
East—most likely in China, from what bits of information
we can piece together—but our own garden will give us
the most for our digging.
Today's Ouija is an improvement upon a device called a
planchette, and it is to the planchette's tale we have now
come. The planchette is a heart-shaped board about ten
inches in length. It balances as a tripod; two of its legs are
wheels and the other, at the pointed end, is a pencil. The
planchette is placed on a sheet of paper, and when one or
more persons rest their fingers on it, the board moves about
spelling words or drawing pictures in one continuous
scrawl.
We know that the planchette appeared first in France
during the 1850's—beyond this, the accounts are wildly
conflicting, and seem to suggest spontaneous generation in
many different quarters. One investigator reports em-
phatically that "in 1853, a well-known French spiritualist,
M. Planchette, invented this instrument to which he gave
his name." This seems quite a coincidence considering the
fact that planchette is a common French word meaning
"little board."
Other accounts of the period stick to 1853 as the year
of discovery, but move the scene to Germany. One reporter
insists that a German milkmaid came upon the phenomenon
when she happened to hold a pencil gripped in a pair of
scissors at arm's length, and found that the pencil began
to write on a conveniently nearby piece of paper.
More reasonable conjecture points once again to the East. A
French explorer returning from China in 1843 reported
one practice so common that every household indulged in it.
A table or smooth floor was sprinkled evenly with bran or
flour. Two people then sat at opposite sides of the
powdered area, holding a small basket between them. A
reed or chopstick was fastened to the basket so that its point
rested in the flour. Then the spirits were invoked by the
 T h e O r a c le ' s O r ig in s 9 7
observers present, and the basket moved about, the trailing
chopstick spelling out messages or making signs and pictures
the group could interpret.
Even if knowledge of this Chinese custom were not wide-
spread, the planchette could have evolved quite naturally
from the phenomenon of table-rapping. Some psychic in-
vestigators of the time hold to this theory of the planchette's
origin. By the 1850's table-rapping was a common
procedure among Spiritualists, that growing minority of
eccentrics convinced that the dead live on and may
communicate with the living. Table-rapping, too, has a long
and obscure history, going back at least to the thirteenth
century Mongols. For our purposes it is enough to note that
it was a well-established method by the time we look in
on it, though not so established that it could not be
improved upon. The proper etiquette was this: a group of
people sat in a circle about a table, their hands palm down on
the tabletop and their little fingers touching those of the
persons on either side so an unbroken circuit was made.
The spirits were invoked and presently the table, or one end
of it, rose into the air to signal a spirit's presence. The table
legs hitting the floor made a "rapping" noise, which became
the basis for all communication from the "spirits" to those
present. One rap meant "no," two raps "yes." In this way not
only could simple questions be answered, but names and
long messages were communicated as well. One of the group
recited the alphabet; when the desired letter was reached, the
table rapped an affirmative reply. Reciting the alphabet for
each letter of each word of each message must have been
quite tedious, and no doubt many groups tried different
ways to streamline the process.
One logical step, once a group had a responsive table
under their hands, was to attach a pencil to a foot of the
table and put a piece of paper on the floor beneath it. The
next logical step was to use a very small table to begin with,
or even a box with a pencil attached to it. It seems that, at
first, people wanted the spectacle of a heavy oak table rising
into the air to convince them that something beyond the
98 THE OUIJA BOOK

play of their imaginations was indeed happening. After that

had been established, they could consider the practical as-
pects of the communication. Eventually even the box was
discarded in favor of a small flat board on wheels—the
planchette as it remains to this day.
Oddly enough, it was not in the drawing rooms of ad-
mitted Spiritualists that the planchette first surfaced, after
its evolution or invention or importation, but in the nun-
neries and monasteries of France. The little board's use was
so widespread among the monks and nuns that in 1856 the
Bishop of Paris felt it necessary to issue a pastoral letter
expressly forbidding the planchette's use among the clergy.
His decree moved the monks and sisters into secrecy rather
than abandonment of the "tablet," as many of them called
it, and it also had the effect of arousing public interest in
the strange phenomenon. Fortunate enquirers began to be
admitted as visitors to the now-secret sessions, and soon
planchettes were popping up in all sorts of places about
Paris, and England as well. Even a few Americans visiting
Paris at the time managed to sit in on ecclesiastical plan-
chette parties; at least one, Dr. H. F. Gardner of Boston,
returned home with a planchette and began making them
for his friends.
All this activity remained, for a while, something of a
sideshow in the general hoopla over Spiritualism and psy-
chic phenomena in Britain, France and the U.S. Dramatic
and spectacular mysteries had taken hold of the public imag-
ination: European psychics like David Dunglass Home
were materializing people who claimed to have lived
thousands of years ago, out of the invisible vapor the Spiri-
tualists called "ectoplasm"; in the United States, haunted
houses and the Fox sisters were conversational topics famil-
iar to everyone. But it took American capitalism to bring
the possibility of personal psychic experience into every
home, and make the planchette an instant popular mania.
In 1868 a U.S. toy company decided the planchette's time
had come, and in that year the booksellers' shops, small-
 The Oracle's Origins 99
town general stores and specialty shops were flooded with
the toys. Thousands of planchettes sold immediately. Peri-
odicals as diverse as Lippincott's Magazine and The Boston
Journal of Chemistry featured articles on the planchette.
Small-town newspapers carried such stories as the New
Albany Ledger's "The Modern Prophet: The Capacity of
Planchette as a Matrimonial Agent." The Boston Watch-
man and Reflector, a religious newspaper, described the
planchette craze this way:
Planchettes trundle in the windows of the tract-house and
tobacco stores, dance among opera scores and Sunday-
school books—heart-shaped planchettes, square planchettes,
planchettes for eight dollars, planchettes for fifty cents,
planchettes of walnut, ash, mahogany, gutta-percha, tin,
glass—planchettes on pegs, coils, and pentagraph wheels.
Planchette confronts you at the dancing parties and in the
minister's study, in the drawing room and the "settin'-
room,"—is a substitute for the weather and Charles
Dickens in the "social circle,"—and the end thereof, who
can foretell?
All this in just one year, 1868. In the same year, two books
devoted to the planchette saw publication: Planchette's
Diary, a young lady's personal account of her planchette
adventures, and Revelations of the Great Modern Mystery
Planchette, and Theories Respecting It, a compilation of
many of the magazine and newspaper articles published that
year. The next year Epes Sargent's Planchette; or, The
Despair of Science was translated from its original French
and published in America. M. Sargent approached the ques-
tion of why this sudden interest in Spiritualism and psychic
phenomena had hit the Western public in the i860's:
The complaint is often made that science has outrun
religious belief; that as men have acquired more knowl-
edge, they have become more and more unsettled in their
opinions as to their inner life, and in the existence even
100 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

of the spiritual world. The facts of modern Spiritualism

present themselves no sooner than they are needed to meet
the want which this tendency has created.

The scientists themselves, on the other hand, put up an

often hysterical, and in every case, irrational opposition to
the planchette and the other psychic phenomena of the day.
Certainly a good deal more questioning than some of the
more gullible true believers allowed themselves would have
been helpful, especially questioning about the sources and
meanings of the physical manifestations. But the scientific
community, on the whole, never got as far as even ad-
mitting that any measurable physical event occurred except
by tricks on the parts of all those participating; the plan-
chette was pushed about deliberately. Several scientific
journals publicly lamented this state of affairs and appealed
to the scientists' more objective sides. Dr. James R. Nichols
wrote about the planchette in The Boston Journal of
Chemistry:
There is in scientific circles a peculiar sensitiveness upon
the subject; and odium and disgrace are liable to rest on
anyone, no matter how high his position may be, who
cherishes a belief even in the reality of the physical
disturbances.

Other scientific journals published appeals for unbiased

investigation of the planchette and chastised those who
had been especially prejudiced in their approach to the sub-
ject. Scientific American cited Professor Faraday, who was
offered the opportunity to investigate the celebrated British
medium D. D. Home:
Mr. Home was invited [by Faraday], as a condition
precedent to Faraday's entering on the investigation, to
acknowledge that the phenomena, however produced,
were ridiculous and contemptible.
 The Oracle's Origins 101
American scientists conducted themselves with no more
dignity than their British counterparts when psychic phe-
nomena were considered. Harvard University organized a
rigidly controlled test of two psychics in 1868; after a per-
formance successful far beyond the mediums' expectations,
considering the hostile conditions, one of the observers, a
Professor Agassiz, had this remark: "I made up my mind
before coming here, that nothing would come of it; and I
am only the more convinced that it is all deception."
It has taken a hundred years for scientists to come to a
more humble outlook and begin the serious study of phe-
nomena beyond the usual range of our senses, but that study
has at last begun. (In Chapter Eight we'll look at the results
so far reported that may help us understand how Ouija
works.) Scientists can now agree with Epes Sargent's rather
quaintly expressed view:

It is the duty of Science to wait upon Nature, to rever-

ently listen to what she chooses to tell, and in the way it
pleases her to utter it, and deal with the facts that are
manifested without ignoring them because others are not
manifested. We must be glad to learn her lessons on the
conditions she chooses to prescribe, thankful to accept
such insight into her arcana as she vouchsafes to grant.
For those delving into Nature's arcana via the planchette,
one drawback to the method soon became apparent: because
the pencil was itself one of the planchette's three legs, it
couldn't lift off the paper between words. The resultant
continuous line of letters, often crossed out when the plan-
chette moved from the end of one line to the beginning of
the next, could often be deciphered, but just as often not.
So the dial-planchette came into popular use as an improve-
ment.
The dial-planchette was very like a roulette wheel: a
circular board with pointer attached at the center. Around
the outside of the circle were printed the alphabet, numbers,
102 THE OUIJA BOOK

YES, NO, GOODBYE and DON'T KNOW. The participants placed

their fingers on the pointer, which then traveled the cir-
cumference of the circle easily on ball bearings or rollers,
stopping on the chosen letters of its message. With someone
present to write down the words spelled, this device was as
fast as the planchette and completely legible. But it too
had its faults.
Some of the dial-planchette's letters were upside down no
matter what one's position by the board—a small inconven-
ience. More irritating was the confusion of the pointer spin-
ning about while two sets of fingers tried to follow it; every
full turn, the participants had to either rotate themselves about
the board or cross their hands over. The positioning of the
pointer in the middle and the letters around the outside also
meant that the operators' hands were often obscuring the
pointer's responses. Obviously the dial-planchette needed to
be simplified into the device we know as the Ouija board.
The exact origin of the talking board in nineteenth century
Europe is another mystery. The trademark OUIJA, a
combination of "yes" in French and in German, suggests
an association with those two countries, but no one really
knows. The apparatus itself is so simple and ancient an idea
that it seems likely it would have evolved naturally from
the planchette and dial-planchette, perhaps first appearing in
several different places at about the same time. Once again,
though, it took the acquisitive American spirit to popularize
the idea on a wide scale.
In 1899 William Fuld, an ambitious small-time
businessman, designed "OUIJA, the MYSTIFYING
ORACLE." Mr. Fuld and his brother, Isaac, marketed
the game for years, and ended up by selling their rights to
Parker Brothers in 1966.
By the turn of the century the planchette craze was a
silly bit of history for most people who remembered the
notoriety it received in 1868. The media had dropped the
subject after their initial interest—science had been unwilling
to enter the debate, and few publications were willing
 The Oracle's Origins 103
to seriously discuss the content of planchette messages—in
fact, not a single U.S. newspaper or magazine carried a
story on the planchette after 1869. Dedicated spiritualists
still experimented with the planchette, and many more
people knew what it was, but the "popular mania" had defi-
nitely evaporated. It's no surprise that when the Ouija board
was first put on the market in 1902 it attracted little atten-
tion. It was not until the First World War ushered in a
sudden and urgent interest in life after death that the Ouija
board caught on in a big way.
All the methods anyone had ever heard about for com-
municating with "the other side" proliferated during the
war. Professional and volunteer mediums were in constant
demand for the solace they could attempt to bring to
grieving widows, mothers, and sometimes fathers—a few
characteristic remarks, perhaps even something "eviden-
tial," to convince them their sons or husbands still lived,
though in another world. Many who could not or would
not go to a medium did try to contact their loved ones by
means of the Ouija board, and some received answers con-
vincing enough to them that they were able to put their
grief in perspective and go on with their lives.
As Ouija became more widely known, many people with
no motive but curiosity began to experiment with it. This
was especially prevalent in the U.S.—in France or Britain it
might have been hard to find anyone not personally
touched by the war's losses. Predictably, the "merely curi-
ous" had results with Ouija that were very different from
the "personal messages" of the grief-stricken. Shortly after
the war it became apparent that these less emotionally in-
volved experimenters had been many and their results
various and surprising; a rash of Ouija books was published
in the first few years following the war. Stewart Edward
White summed up the phenomenon this way:
The procedure was almost standard. Two people—or a
group—fooling with the thing as a lark or out of curiosity. It
moves. It becomes coherent. It spells out "messages."
104 THE OU IJA- BOOK

That was the start, the "take-off." What happened after

that depended on the people involved. The subsequent
proceedings ranged from the "communications" of pure
spiritualism to speculative philosophy. Nine in ten of them
were spoiled for any serious consideration by what might
be called the awed approach that inhibited any common-
sense editorial appraisal. This was a pity. After a time even
those especially interested in such things became inclined
to shy off from "another Ouija board book."
In Chapter Four we looked at some of the more ridiculous
products of the "awed approach"; in the next chapter we'll
explore the finest "speculative philosophy" to emerge in
this phase of the history of Ouija.
By the 1920's Ouija had nearly completed its metamor-
phosis in the public eye from occult object to curious toy,
aided by the demystifying effect of the many new books
on psychic phenomena. Organized religions of this country
all more or less vehemently opposed the toy. Some ignored
it; some, like the Latter-Day Saints, took official positions
against it; a few Fundamentalist sects circulated tracts de-
nouncing this "tool of Satan." Sales of the Ouija board
climbed steadily; the toy took its place next to the
Monopoly® and Scrabble® games on shelves in American
homes.
Interest in Ouija, and in psychic phenomena in general,
grew at a slow and steady pace from the 1920's up
until the sudden spectacular boom of the last ten years.
Though Ouija hasn't played a very noticeable part in this
newest phase of psychic expansion, it has served as a
beginning for the explorations of a number of well-known
and now well-developed psychics—Jane Roberts of "Seth"
fame among them. There must be a wealth of undocumented
exploration going on as well—Parker Brothers has sold more
than seven million Ouija boards in the last decade. Can they
all be gathering dust beside the Monopoly® set?
 CHAPTER SEVEN

Words of Ouija®

I shall play with words like castanets. I shall

set them twinkling like stars, yea, and make
them pale and languorous. I shall burn them of
passion and wreak them dizzy of twisting. He
who keepeth apace shall find him a lout at the
prancin'.
-"PATIENCE WORTH," 1915

In this chapter we'll follow the prancing of Ouija pointers

under different hands in different times and places, repeating
word for word what Ouija has spelled. If Ouija words could
make a patchwork quilt, then we have just arrived at the
quilting bee. We learned last Autumn how to embroider
quilting pieces, and we've brought along the ones we've
made so far. We'll begin here to look at the patches our
neighbors have contributed. Who knows what sort of crazy-
quilt will result?
First we'll look to "Patience Worth," a seventeenth century
spinster who made herself known through Ouija and would
probably appreciate the idea of a Ouija patchwork quilt. As
you may have gathered from the remarks of hers I've already
quoted, Patience Worth was (is?) a very definite personality,
even though she may have had no existence
105
106 THE OU IJA BOOK

apart from the Ouija board. Patience first appeared on a

summery St. Louis evening of 1913, at the Ouija board of
two friends, Emily Hutchings and Pearl Curran. Emily was
full of enthusiasm for Ouija, and for over a year had man-
aged now and then to secure Pearl's participation at the
board, even though Pearl had no real interest in the toy and
the pair's results had been consistently banal. On this eve-
ning Emily's persistence finally rewarded her. The pointer
revved up its motions and spelled: "Many moons ago I lived.
Again I come—Patience Worth my name." After suitable
exclamations over this greeting, the two women put their
fingers on the pointer again, and immediately the message
resumed:
Wait, I would speak with thee. If thou shalt live, then
so shall I. I make my bread at thy hearth. Good friends,
let us be merrie. The time for work is past. Let the tabby
drowse and blink her wisdom to the firelog.
With that introduction, Patience Worth and her fleshly
collaborators began what was to become probably the most
prolific and certainly the most publicized series of Ouija
board messages ever. In just the first five years of her twenty-
five-year-long Ouija existence, Patience Worth spelled out
enough words to fill thirty volumes the size of this book.
Four volumes of her Ouija words were published: The
Sorry Tale: a Story of the Time of Christ, Hope Trueblood,
and The Pot Upon the Wheel, all three of them novels, and
Light from Beyond, a selection of poetry. Much was writ-
ten about the Patience Worth phenomenon as well, with
psychologists, linguists, psychic researchers and all manner
of curious people attending Ouija sittings, adding up to
thousands of onlookers over the years. At the height of the
popular enthusiasm there was even a monthly publication
called Patience Worth's Magazine (it lasted only ten
months).
The ladies in charge of all this uproar at the Ouija board
 Words of Ouija® 107

soon discovered that Pearl Curran was the true medium

necessary for Patience Worth's emergence; Pearl could sit
at the Ouija table with any partner and still receive mes-
sages, but Emily had no results at all without Pearl. Patience
described the situation thus: "I hae said it be a trick o'
throbbin'. The wench be atuned unto the throb o' me." It
was clearly not a trick of any more obvious sort. Pearl
Curran was a thirty-one-year-old middle-class housewife
with an eighth grade education and no previous interest in
spiritualism or the occult. She was an intelligent woman
but unremarkable aside from her connection with Patience
Worth. Various investigators of the puzzle quizzed Pearl
on her knowledge of or exposure to literature, poetry, his-
tory—all subjects well known to Patience—and Pearl's
replies showed her to be either too ignorant or too full of
grace even to be embarrassed by her lack of knowledge.
Pearl regarded her Ouija adventure as a spiritual education,
and made the sittings and their results available to as many
people as possible without ever attempting to exploit the
phenomenon for financial gain. As she described her ex-
perience:
Whatever may be the association which I describe as
the presence of Patience Worth, it is one of the most beau-
tiful that it can be the privilege of a human being to ex-
perience. Through this contact I have been educated to a
deeper spiritual understanding and appreciation than I
might have acquired in any study I can conceive of. Six
years ago I could not have understood the literature of
Patience Worth had it been shown to me. And I doubt if
it would have attracted me sufficiently to give me the
desire to study it.
Patience Worth's productions did, on the whole, require
a bit of study before making complete sense to our modern
ears. Her first messages came through in fairly straightfor-
ward and simple English, but as her speech became more
108 THE OUIJA BOOK
familiar to her audience, Patience sprinkled her messages
more and more thickly with archaic English dialect of the
seventeenth century. The poetry, especially, uses words and
expressions and quaint spellings long gone from the English
language. One novel, Hope Trueblood, is written entirely
in modern English. Another, Telka, uses a combination of
dialects from different parts of England, with not a word
that has come into the language later than the sixteenth
century.
Telka provides a good example of the astonishing literary
stunts that were a large part of the fascination Patience
Worth held for many people. It is a seventy-thousand-word
novel in verse form, and took thirty-five hours of Ouija
board time to produce. Its characters are fully developed,
its plot well planned, and its language a complicated one.
Needless to say, an experienced stenographer was a necessary
part of these Ouija sessions. Patience sometimes worked on as
many as four novels at once, spelling a few sentences for
one, then a few lines for another, throwing in a poem here
and there and occasionally stopping to enter into con-
versation with the Ouija sitters. She never lost her place as
we would, but could pick up any story just where she had
left it. She also became well known for her impromptu
poems, composed on the spot from topics or images sug-
gested by onlookers at the Ouija session. My favorite of
these short poems is a response to a request for a children's
bedtime prayer more appropriate than the insipid and often
morbid ones common to the day. I grew up with the lines "If
I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take"
echoing around me as I went to sleep, and even as a child I
considered this unnecessarily grim. Patience Worth's offering:
I, Thy child forever, play
About Thy knees at close of day;
Within Thy arms I now shall creep
And learn Thy wisdom while I sleep.
 Words of Ou ija® 109

Since samples of Patience Worth's peculiar archaic style

of speech appear at the beginnings of both this chapter and
Chapter Two, I'll include here an excerpt from her only
long message in modern prose, the novel Hope Trueblood.
This passage comes near the beginning of the tale, setting
its scene and introducing characters and leaving us tanta-
lized, wondering what comes next. (Though Hope True-
blood has been out of print many years, it can still be found
in public libraries old enough to have ordered it at the
height of its popularity-1918.)
"The man should be held up before the people. He is
clothed in the garb of the hypocrite." I sucked the plum
stone and wondered what a hypocrite was and if
they were upon the road at night. "Sally
Trueblood's brat!" I looked to the sampler and read
slowly, "God is Love." And I wondered what a brat
was.
Mr. Passwater seemed not to relish his port, and Miss
Patricia sipped hers gingerly. I sneezed and Miss
Patricia seemed not to hear me, but continued, "'Tis
shameful."
I got from off the hassock and tiptoed over to the
castle beneath the glass and stood rapt. Beside it lay a
book of prayer. It was thin and flat and black, and I
knew it was Miss Patricia's. From this I went up to the
what-all, and the lights played o'er it and I stood before
it filled with wonder. Upon the third shelf was a china
dog, with a babe upon its back. Oh, to touch this! I
turned stealthily and looked to Miss Patricia. She did
not see. I reached forth one hand and tiptoed and it
was mine. I hugged it close to make sure and the what-
all shook and rattled. Miss Patricia was upon her feet in
an instant and pounced upon me, taking me within her
grasp so suddenly that I let fall the china dog. Miss
Patricia gasped:
"A thief! My dear brother William's pet! Oh, that
the earth should be so sinful! Reuben Passwater, take this
brat out of this house! Shut her out!"
And Miss Patricia shook me. I whimpered, and stooped to
110 THE OUIJA® BOOK
pick up the dog, tenderly, leaving my tears to fall upon
it, and offered it to her hand sniffling. Miss Patricia took
it and placed it upon the third shelf where it had stood
and I backed away staring, my fingers within my mouth
and the tears coursing down my cheeks. I knew what a
thief was. Miss Patricia stared at me and looked at my feet,
crying out:
"Why does your worthless mother leave you free in
night's hour to visit Christian homes? Your feet are upon
the ground. Where are your better shoes?"
"I haven't none, thanks. She has promised 'em at Mayin'."
This seemed to send Miss Patricia into a storm, for she
rocked and shrieked and beat her bosom, crying out that
the tongues of the village were lashes and that no Christian
might dwell among them, stopping only to shout: "Take
her away! Take her away!"
Mr. Passwater stooped slowly and took up a shoe and
put it on, then the other just as slowly. He arose and
buttoned his vest, sighed, went for his greatcoat and made
a sign for me to follow. We went out of a narrow hallway
that smelled of mutton. Mr. Passwater opened the latch
and we stepped into the night. I followed him, frightened,
and he did not speak. I did not seem to fear Mr. Passwater,
but the dark. He seemed silent, and, as I write, I see his
dark form stooped and hear him step heavily and my light
footfall following, pattering.
During Patience Worth's years of public notice, the mys-
tery of her identity remained a foremost topic of debate.
Patience herself had very little interest in the subject, in-
sisting that the importance of her messages lay in the words
themselves. She gave few and sketchy details of her sup-
posed lifetime as "Patience Worth," and these she revealed
only in the context of her poetry and stories. (For instance,
she seemed to know the countryside of southern England,
she never married, she sailed to North America near the
end of her life.) The philosophy and opinions of this ex-
traordinary voice of Ouija were likewise tucked neatly away
 Words of Ouija® 111
in her literary productions, and can't be extracted and sum-
marized with their grace and wit intact. That is as Patience
Worth intended, so I'll leave her here and go on to other
voices. For readers who want to know more of Patience,
there are, besides the works I've already mentioned, two
books about Patience Worth, both out of print but avail-
able at libraries: Patience Worth: A Psychic Mystery, by
Casper Yost (Henry Holt and Co., 1916), and The Case of
Patience Worth, by Walter Franklin Prince (University
Books, 1964—first published in 1927 by the Boston Society
for Psychic Research).
A Ouija experience similar in form to Pearl Curran's
adventure with Patience Worth is recounted in the anony-
mously written book of 1920, mentioned earlier, called Our
Unseen Guest. The authors, a married couple known to us
only as "Darby" and "Joan," unexpectedly made the ac-
quaintance of a voice of Ouija they called Stephen. Like
Patience, Stephen presents himself as a very definite per-
sonality, complete with a life history that is mentioned but
not emphasized, as well as the more convincing evidence
of individuality shown in peculiarities of speech. Like Pa-
tience, Stephen claims to be able to communicate because
he is specially "atuned" to one Ouija partner (Joan). The
messages Stephen and Patience bring have many similarities
at their most basic levels of meaning (we'll consider these
in Chapter Nine). The styles of the two, however, are
worlds apart, just as Pearl Curran and Joan must have been
very different people.
From the meager clues Darby lets fall in Our Unseen
Guest, we can deduce that Joan and Darby were both college
educated and that they both held professional jobs in a
large city (Chicago, I've since discovered). Darby's ac-
count of their Ouija beginnings shows the couple's articu-
lacy and, compared with Pearl Curran, their sophistication
as well:

Our first experience with psychic phenomena occurred

on the evening of December 7, 1916—by way of a Ouija
112 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

board. Neither Joan nor I had ever seen a Ouija board

before. The "toy" came into our hands quite by accident.
We were taking our dinners at a private boarding-house
some blocks from the apartment building in which we
lived. On the evening in question a sudden storm blew
off the lake, while we were at table, and after the meal
Joan and I wandered into a deserted sitting-room to wait
until the wind and sleet abated. There one of the residents
had left the Ouija, a remnant doubtless of some Hallowe'en
party.
"How does the thing work? ' Joan asked.
I read the directions; we rested the board, whereon the
alphabet was printed in two semi-circles, upon our knees,
and put the tips of our fingers on the flatiron-like pointer.
"Now," said I, "this tripod affair is supposed to move
from letter to letter, spelling out a message."
Thus we sat for a period—ten minutes, perhaps. We
joked, I remember, of the good fortunes Ouija would tell
us. But no message came. Then, just as we were about to
give up, the tripod began to move.
"Quality of consciousness," it spelled. A pause—then,
once more, "Quality of consciousness."
"Darby!" Joan took her fingers from the pointer. "You
can't fool me like that. You did it! 'Quality of conscious-
ness'—that doesn't mean anything, anyway."
I looked into Joan's eyes. Was it she who had moved
the tripod, or did she honestly accuse me?
"Not guilty!" I pleaded. For a moment we faced each
other in silence. Then said Joan, gravely, "Let's try it
again." So we tried it again.
On the instant the tripod gathered strength. Over the
alphabet it moved, slowly, yet with machine-like precision,
pausing on this letter and that. Here are the words it
spelled:
"For you two I have a message, a revelation. Communi-
cation is so slow, so difficult, that I can do little more than
give you the suggestion. But if you will reason along the
lines I point out, you can reach the truth."
 Words of Ouija 113

"What truth?"
"In as far," the answer came, "as it is given you to under-
stand, that ultimate truth—the why, the whence, the
whither—which men have longed to know since knowl-
edge was."

As you can see, these are direct and purposeful people,

conversing with a Ouija voice of similar temperament. No
Patience for poetry and allusion here—just plain revelation. It
is a complex revelation that emerges, though, a philosophy
that brings the worlds on both sides of death into a hopeful
and communicative alliance. Stephen builds this philosophy
through many lessons, defining new terms as he goes and
stretching Darby's and Joan's understanding with each
Ouija session. We'll listen in on one of the earlier conver-
sations, feeling the intimations of possibilities yet to unfold.
"Define the quality and quantity of consciousness," I
said.
Stephen answered: "Quality is soul, as when you say a
person has a beautiful or sensitive soul. Soul is the best
word for our present purpose, though character would in a
measure express the thought. I have told you that gradu-
ated consciousness is, in part, reborn into your world. I
tell you now that the part so reborn is the quality, the
soul."
"Your definition," I said, "is not as opaque as a brick
wall, nor is it as clear as a windowpane."
"Later the thought will shape itself," Stephen assured
me. "And now for quantity. Quantity is that development
which results from the use an individual makes of his
quality of consciousness."
"Do you mean growth of character?" asked Joan.
"Exactly," Stephen replied.
"When I speak of the quality of gold as being distinct
from the quality of iron, the word presents no difficulty.
Yet when I speak of the quality of human consciousness
you are confused. This should not be, but—as Joan might
I14 THE OUIJA® BOOK
say—because it is, I tell you the quality of a man's con-
sciousness is his soul.
"Take electricity. It is force. Take gravitation. It, too,
is force. Now the thing that distinguishes these two forces
one from the other is their differing quality.
"Well, the quality of human consciousness is parallel to
the quality of gravitation and to the quality of electricity.
The earth term heretofore used for the quality of human
consciousness has been soul, by which term men have
sought to name that which distinguishes them from all else.
In other words, they have recognized the distinctiveness
of their own quality."
"Why, that's simple enough," I was forced to admit.
"And all great truths are most astounding in their sim-
plicity," spelled the Ouija board.
"Take electricity again. Can you not see that its quality
is fixed? It is that very unalterableness of quality that
makes it electricity rather than, for example, centrifugal
force. So it is with human consciousness. But now get this:
Though your quality on the earth-plane is restricted, I on
my plane am free to develop quality, just as you now are
free to develop quantity."
The tripod paused, then moved, then halted again, then
said: "Does it mean anything to you when I say that the
only difference between your plane of consciousness and
mine is that yours is quantitative in its development, while
mine is qualitative? At any rate, from now on I shall speak
of my plane as the qualitative plane and yours as the
quantitative."
Stephen never claimed sole authorship of this message; in
fact he paused in his Ouija board delivery at times to con-
sult other personalities accessible to his range of being. One
of these "spirits" became so enthusiastically involved in the
revelation that he sometimes overruled Stephen's control
of the Ouija board and spelled out words himself. Darby
and Joan learned to recognize the arrival of this other
 Words of Ouija® 115
personality even before any words were spelled, by the
sudden difference in the feel of the pointer under their
fingers. Darby hints broadly that he and Joan guessed the
identity of this messenger, whom they nicknamed "the
professor." In terms even more vague, lest he be accused
of quackery or Ouija board egotism, Darby intimates that
the professor may be philosopher William James. Whatever
his identity, the professor is a delightful Ouija voice with a
decidedly didactic style. Here he is, lecturing on one of his
favorite topics:
The free will of man, my dear sir, is the one attribute
that is wholly and distinctly his own. Degrees of con-
sciousness nearing man have something that approaches
reason, something even closer to memory, and are pos-
sessed of attributes comparable to the five senses. But
animal life does not have free will. This is man's peculiar
possession. Because of free will man is man.
The will of man is hampered not even by his quality, be
it low. It is as free for all men as for one. But for an
individual to live up to his quality he must use his will
in the gathering of quantity. Not to use the freedom of
one's will is to deny one's self of self. Free will constitutes
every man's opportunity, permitting him to control the
degree of consciousness he attains on graduation.
Do not make any mistake about the freedom of man's
will. It is his to use, and use develops it, just as exercise
develops the muscles of one's body. Disuse deadens it. And
as to the purpose of free will make no mistake. For it is
only as the free will carries out the behests of that still,
small voice, man's quality of consciousness, that the lessons
of earth are finished, the book closed, and a wider world,
a greater freedom and more perfect understanding attained
upon graduation.

Not all voices of Ouija present themselves in such indi-

vidualized fashion. My belief is that we tend to receive
116 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

messages in whatever form we find easiest to digest. For

many people, conversation with a specific "spirit" feels
more comfortable than messages from "the void." For others
the reverse is true. In Betty and Stewart White began to
receive Ouija messages from a source identified to them
only as "the Invisibles." Ouija words spelled out lessons in
spiritual and psychic development, practical day-by-day
lessons that Stewart White, a successful writer already, in-
corporated into a series of books. The first volumes of Ouija
lessons, published in 1925 and 1928, made no mention
of the source of Stewart's inspiration, but in 1937, when
finally he felt that he could make public such an odd source
of knowledge without feeling foolish or being called a fool,
Stewart White produced The Betty Book, in which he gave
all the details of the long adventure and quoted long pas-
sages straight from the spirits as well. Here is a sample of
the guidance of "the Invisibles":
Walk through your days as a creature with folded
wings, conscious of the possession of another element and
the ability to enter it. When worries and world annoyances
come, you can rise strongly and determinedly, spend a few
moments in calm, and at once descend reinforced to the
object in hand.
If you want to get anywhere, you have to take this
philosophy home with you, and dress it, and eat it, and
breathe it, and motor down town with it. When you are
able to do that you are ready for something more. At
present anything more than what you have would over-
flow into merely an intellectual appreciation.
Months of successful effort must elapse, until you are
steeped, saturated, permeated with the fluid strength of
spiritual contact. At first you are struggling in a kind of
blind instinct to gather strength, but without being able
to see what you have achieved. Keep your faith in the
vitality of effort. It requires mastering before you can feel
the repose, the assurance of strength and progress.
 Words of Ouija® 117

You must have something to which to refer yourself:

first as a stake in water swirling about; then as planted in
sand; and then as a fixed point in space. It doesn't matter
how you symbolize it, but you must have something con-
stant in yourself.
Very often my results with the Ouija board have had a
tone similar to "the Invisibles' "—soothing paragraphs of
encouragement and advice, delivered from a very vaguely
identified source. When I began my Ouija explorations I
would have scoffed loudly, and felt fearful underneath the
scoff, at the idea of "spirit communicators." I've since
loosened my grip on that fear and had some lovely Ouija
conversations with Ouija voices full of personality and his-
tory, but the less specific voices remain the most constant
form at my board. Here are two examples of guiding mes-
sages from my notes. My friend Laurel accompanied me in
these productions, and the advice was meant for us both,
though sometimes more especially for one or the other.
For these messages, we sat down at the Ouija board in the
morning and asked for thoughts to take with us through
the day.
Place your trust in the infinite flow of your destiny.
Your fate is to grow in love and wisdom. Do not fight it
as if without your worries fate would take you to loneli-
ness and despair. Let go of the arrogance of thinking you
are alone in this world without spiritual guides. Angels
hover near you and you say, "I am alone. No one cares
about me. I must make sense of the world myself."
You are both more and less important than that. More
because you are watched and guided carefully when you
allow. Angels cry when you do. Less because you are
presently in a limited situation from which you cannot
possibly figure out on your own the world's or your life's
meaning. You need spiritual guidance and we need you
just as surely. Let these words permeate your beings today.
—January 17, 1977
118 THE OUIJA BOOK

Love. Move in love and needs will take care of them-

selves. Move in joy and fear will run past you quickly.
You are alive and there is joy and thankfulness to be found
in that if you will allow it to enter you. Move in love and
joy and the need for what you call security will fade from
you. This security is not the basic necessity you think it is.
Your real security lies in the eternally growing wisdom
and joy of your beings. The physical and emotional se-
curity you value is necessary to you only because you do
not see your real and lasting security. You can only be-
come aware of your eternal beings as you take away your
attention from false security. This does not mean that you
must become beggars in the streets, just that you must
turn your attention to love. —January 23, 1977
We've looked at literature and philosophy as produced
by personalitied voices of Ouija, and at inspirational advice
from undefined sources. Now it's time to remind ourselves
of two important points. One, that when we speak of the
"source" of a voice of Ouija being a spirit or a vague force
or an anything else, we're indulging in a convenient conven-
tion. Whatever Patience Worth may be, for instance, she
is a much more complex phenomenon than our image of a
disembodied spinster poet transported from seventeenth
century England. Whatever she is, Patience does not exist
as we know her apart from Pearl Curran. Perhaps there is
another Patience Worth in some otherworldly dimension
of experience, but in our world Pearl Curran has created,
not with conscious effort but simply by living her life, the
only Patience Worth there is. In the same way, just by
bringing our unique perspectives and histories to the Ouija
board, each of us creates there some confluence of words
and meanings never before seen in this world.
Which brings us to the second point to remember: the
sampling of voices of Ouija in this chapter is just that.
We've held up particular pieces of the Ouija patchwork
quilt. They are meant to delight and inspire us. They are
 Words of Ouija® 119
not intended as a description of possibilities. In the same
way you might see that a neighbor brought a red calico
square to the quilting bee and Aunt Minnie brought a
purple striped piece, and you might like the red print and
learn a new applique stitch from Aunt Minnie's contribu-
tion to the quilt, and still not jump to the conclusion that
quilts can be made two ways, from red squares or from
purple squares, just so can we see that voices of Ouija here
are either very personified or very vague and there must
be many other colors we can use as well.
I'll say this another way, with one more example from
my own Ouija adventures. My current Ouija preoccupation
began one afternoon when Laurel and I sat down at the
board and said to it: "Write a novel." The pointer started
right in, surprising us both immensely. The surprise has
deepened since, as we unroll complicated plots and subplots,
as separate characters and strands of story finally meet each
other, as mysteries are solved and darker mysteries created.
There seems to be no single Ouija personality in charge of
the production, though from time to time the story is told by
an unnamed and invisible narrator. At other times various
characters tell their corners of the story, each with a distinct
vocabulary and tone. Here is the beginning of the tale:

Just now we're questioning no one, though since Jeremy

asked why not I've begun wondering myself. Of course I
wouldn't say it out loud. Neither would Jeremy if he
wasn't such a new one. Not that I could tell you why—it's
that oddness I feel sometimes, like the day Mary Ellen
went away. It was announced on the box at lunch hour
that Mary Ellen had been promoted, because of her good
will, unflinching faithfulness, and all those other good
qualities they always describe at such announcements, to a
post in the laundry at All-in-one. The box said she left
Tuesday evening to join the shirt-press staff as they pre-
pared for the coming summer solstice banquet. Now I'm
120 THE OUIJA@ BOOK

sure it's not sour grapes I feel—some of the girls here go

out for shirt-pleat awards, but I'm not one of them. I just
don't have ambitions about ironing in the capital, though
I'm as good a worker as any of them, when it comes down
to it. And I don't feel bad that Mary Ellen didn't come and
say goodbye to me, though I confess I would have ex-
pected her to. I guessed she was just too pressed for time—
oh the stupid puns you pick up at the laundry works—if
I changed my occupation everyone would know me as a
presser still. But how likely is a change that drastic? Such
odd ideas springing on me lately and I don't know why.
But this other oddness—how my mind wanders when I try
writing a simple bit of the day before I sleep, wanting I
guess to distinguish each day somehow from the others.
Anyway, I've had this queasy feeling all week, since Mary
Ellen left, and I don't know what it is or how to describe
it except to say it's the same feeling I got this afternoon
when Jeremy asked why don't we ask questions anymore.
There's some connection—or maybe it's just the change
of life affecting my nerves. I even thought, today, of send-
ing a letter to Mary Ellen in All-in-one, and I started
writing it in my mind as I changed the press, when all at
once I realized—letters can't go from Fernville to All-in-
one. Letters are only delivered within the towns. It's always
been this way and all our news and communication with All-
in-one and everywhere comes from the box and that's the
way it always has been and should be. Still I do wish Jeremy
and Mary Ellen both would get out of my thoughts.
I remember, and not so long ago, when I didn't have a care
in the world, and everything meant just what it seemed to.
Well, I sure won't go saying any of this confusion
anywhere but this little notebook. They'll never have to
return me to Eden because of early senility.

From here the tale shifts to other voices and very dif-
ferent perspectives, following the activities of a group of
people, Jeremy and Mary Ellen among them, engaged in
 Words of Ouija® 121

clandestine cultivation of psychic powers. Occasionally

Shirley the laundry worker's diary brings in a counter-
pointed perspective: she knows Mary Ellen and Jeremy of
the psychic circle only through their jobs at the laundry,
but she is drawn to them, and writes about them, perhaps
because she is just beginning to question "official" reality, to
feel odd, at odds with it, and she senses that for these two
everything does not mean just what it seems to mean. The
"official" reality, revealed in Shirley's first diary entry only by
oblique clues—the "box," her vague fears about feeling odd,
the reference to being returned to Eden—continues to
unfold slowly, clue by clue, through the action of the
story and the words of the participants.
Each character in this drama seems wholely an individ-
ual, a fully functioning, unique Ouija personality. Their
interaction appears to be as complex as any between em-
bodied people. The timing and coordination of the whole
production is intelligently and creatively planned some-
where. Where? Who? How? That's what we'll explore
next.
 CHAPTER EIGHT
How the Ouija®
Board Works

The superstition of the past is the science of

the present, the proverb of the future.
-STEWART EDWARD WHITE, 1937

We can begin to ask this chapter's question by studying the

details of Ouija's movements, piecing together the findings
of many careful observers and seeing what sort of larger
whole those observations describe. By the end of the chapter
we will have gone as far into the absolute as present scientific
fact can take us, still without quite answering our question
about how this small toy works. To complete our
understanding, we must ask our question again in Chapter
Nine, this time from the opposite end of the spectrum,
starting with theories about how the universe works and
filtering slowly down to our alphabets and pointers. Only
when we have followed both these directions, and woven
together their separate strands of fact and conjecture, will
we be able to see what a complex shimmering sturdy gar-
ment we're wearing—even though we've been wearing it
all our lives.
122
 How the Ouija® Board Works 123
To start with the most purely mechanical aspect of our
question: how does the pointer actually move? The simplest
part of the answer—we push it with our fingers—is obvious
only to someone who has never tried the device. For the
rest of us, "the hand is quicker than the eye" has taken on
new meaning, for we have to admit that our own hands are in
this case quicker than our own eyes. The muscles of our
fingers are able to exert pressures so subtle and precise that
even though we give the process our full attention, we can't
consciously detect that we push the pointer of Ouija. (If
you can feel your fingers pushing, lighten up.)
Forces more mysterious than muscles can play a part in
the pointer's movements too, in fact may create some part of
all Ouija movement. I've seen a pointer continue to make its
way across the alphabet after both partners had taken their
fingers away. Friends of mine report Ouija pointers flying
out from under their fingers to sail across the room. You
may have noticed by now that at some sessions the pointer
seems especially "charged" somehow with energy. It may
almost vibrate under your fingertips, or move about with
such force that you feel the pointer's blast-off into outer
space may be imminent. All these occurrences, which
in scientific terms would be called examples of
psychokinesis, imply that some type of energy other
than simple muscle power has collected in the pointer. The
properties and behavior of this energy are hot subjects of
debate among present-day researchers of the paranormal,
as we shall see.
The most intriguing way to view our question is to wonder
not only how the pointer moves, but how it comes to spell
out messages so far removed from our conscious knowledge.
Both the unexplained physical movements of the pointer and
the transmission of information through the device can be
imagined as dependent on the same mysterious energy source.
This is the hypothesis, or working guess, of many psychic
researchers today. The Ouija board can provide us, as we've
already seen, with examples from almost
124 THE OUIJA@ BOOK
the entire range of psychic phenomena: telepathy (com-
municating from mind to mind), clairvoyance (seeing objects
or events not visually accessible), precognition (foretelling
the future), psychokinesis (physical effects such as Ouija
pointer movement from apparently nonphysical sources),
and survival phenomena (apparent evidence of life after
death). Since these areas overlap and reinforce each other
abundantly, and in fact are altogether tangled, we'll leave
them that way, as others before us have done. We'll follow
the whole knotted tangle down the path of recent scientific
research, assuming that where one strand leads we are bound
to find the others too.
It will come as no surprise to us to learn that the Ouija
board itself has never been scientifically tested. The toy not
only has the sort of reputation that can make a scientist
shiver in his test tubes, it also has the distinction of implicat-
ing so many factors in its behavior that tracing back to the
source becomes far too complicated a task. Luckily for us,
simpler tools utilizing the same principles as Ouija have been
studied in controlled settings, and we can reflect the results
back on our own endeavor. We'll do well to remember that
though we're moving into the domain of science, these areas
still lead an uncertain existence on the outer fringes of that
exacting land. Even today many established and respected
scientists deny that any of the unexplained phenomena
we're examining exist at all. Meanwhile we will look in on the
work of the second generation of psychic researchers, who
carry on in spite of their invisibility in the scientific
establishment.
The Ouija board is a refined and rather complicated ver-
sion of a range of tools that utilize the human nervous
system's talents as a receiver and translator of information.
The necessary ingredients are (1) a human consciousness
with which to ask a question or focus in on a particular topic,
(2) a nervous system (this includes our brains as well as every
nerve in our bodies) capable of scanning the available
information environment, selecting an "answer," translating
 How the Ouija@ Board Works 125

that answer into language meaningful to the conscious

mind of the questioner, and transmitting the chosen
information via (3) a device that amplifies subconscious
motor movements and/or utilizes some other, as yet un-
known, form of energy generated or conducted by the
human body.
The board's particular richness lies in its interweaving of
two human beings as receivers and transmitters and creators
of its messages, and also in the wide spectrum of reply
provided by the alphabet and numerals. The planchette has
the added advantage of the language of lines; its pencil-
pointer can draw pictures or diagrams. Dowsing tools, which
range from simple forked sticks to professional-looking
metal rods, work within a basic language of yes and no, with
refinements, such as indications of direction or depth,
invented by individual dowsers. The simplest tool of all is
the pendulum, just a hand-held string with a weight tied to it.
The pendulum is another yes-and-no indicator, swinging
back and forth or describing circles to make its replies.
The pendulum and dowsing rod are the tools similar to
Ouija best suited to scientific scrutiny, since the simplicity
of their mechanisms and their narrow range of possible reply
rule out many of the board's confusions and allow the ex-
perimenters to control more aspects of their adventure.
Dowsing (this term can refer to use of a pendulum as well
as dowsing rods) has the added advantage of a long history
of use outside the parameters of "the occult." This makes
it much more attractive to scientists, and less scary. We've
all heard of the old practice of dowsing for underground
water, in which the dowser walks along holding the ends of
a forked stick before him in both hands, and the stick points
down when underground water is crossed. This method
for finding water is widely accepted today in much of
Europe, and widely used, although not so well accepted,
in the U.S.
Dowsing for water is the most mundane and easily ex-
plained application of our range of supersensory tools.
Underground water has been shown to create a weak
126 THE OUIJA@ BOOK
electromagnetic field. It is a simple step to assume that the
instruments that are our bodies can detect such fields, just as
our bodies react to changes in the gravitational field
caused by the moon's rotation about the earth. Dowsing only
begins with such simplicities as water-witching, however. In
the Soviet Union, dowsing has evolved into a highly respected
and "scientific" activity called "the biophysical method."
Russian dowsers, traveling via cross-country motor vehicles,
search for every sort of underground treasure, from copper
ore to buried archeological sites. The Russians' report on
conditions affecting dowsing ability could easily be
mistaken for Hester Travers Smith expounding on con-
ditions affecting Ouija board operation: both say illness,
cold winds, bad moods, and negative or idiotic remarks or
questions from casual observers detrimentally affect the
endeavor.
Dowsing enters the medical domain on a large scale in
France, where the use of the pendulum to diagnose illness
has been given the name "radiesthesia." The practice is so
widespread that French medical dowsers even have a union
—Syndicat National des Radiesthe'sistes. Many of these
practitioners use the pendulum to prescribe medications as
well as in diagnosis. One of the most famous (or infamous,
depending on one's vantage point) of French medical
dowsers is the Reverend Pere Jean Jurion, a Catholic priest
who uses a pendulum to diagnose illness and to prescribe
homeopathic medications. Rev. Jurion has been taken to
court by the French government countless times for his
unorthodox, unschooled and unlicensed medical practices.
The most encouraging sign of progress we can note in his
story is that the Catholic Church continues to support Rev.
Jurion. French Catholic monasteries and nunneries were
Europe's surfacing ground for the planchette over a hundred
years ago. Church authorities at that time forbade use of the
planchette, but here it is in another form, focused now on
medicine rather than metaphysics, and this time used with
the Church's blessing.
 How the Ouija® Board Works 127

In this country medical dowsing began with a charac-

teristically American emphasis on technology. Early this
century, San Francisco doctor Albert Abrams developed
diagnostic machines with complicated electronic circuitry, on
the hypothesis that all living organisms give out characteristic
"electronic emanations." His machines were meant to "read"
these emanations, which varied with the patient's state of
health. Abrams had the good fortune of being independently
wealthy as well as being a respected and well-trained medical
doctor. His most inventive pupil, Ruth Drown, had neither
of these assets; she was denounced as a quack and lived out
the last years of her life in the California Institute for
Women, the only women's prison in the state of California.
It's easy enough to imagine, from Ruth Drown's startling
work, how she attracted such intense opposition. After
spending several years modifying Albert Abrams' electronic
gadgetry, discarding many of the parts considered essential
and finding that the devices still worked, Ruth Drown went on
to initiate the long-distance diagnosis of patients, working
from just a blood sample or even a lock of hair. Next she
found that by placing a lock of a patient's hair or a blood
sample in her apparatus along with a photographic plate, she
could obtain photographs of the entire patient, with internal
organs outlined and problem areas clearly visible. She
diagnosed hundreds of patients by this method without ever
meeting the individuals personally.
Although all of Ruth Drown's equipment was destroyed
by the government, other researchers have since replicated
her findings, sometimes without having known of her work
at all—even the mysterious photographic process has been
reclaimed. The field has taken on a new seriousness with
the widespread adoption of the title "radionics." Edward
Russell, the most knowledgeable writer in this area, defines
radionics well:
Radionics, a word coined about 1935, is the modern name
for an ancient medical art. It is based on the fact that the
I28 THE OUIJA BOOK

human mind can be attuned to detect characteristic emana-

tions from all forms of organic or inorganic matter.
Radionics—usually assisted by instruments to help focus
the mind of the operator—uses the superconscious mind
to diagnose and treat diseases in humans, animals, and
crops.
Here we've come to the confession that the purpose of
radionic instruments is to "help focus the mind of the op-
erator." In this field, scientific progress has led to more and
more simplified technology. Ruth Drown began the process
by discarding unnecessary components of Abrams' diag-
nostic machines. Other investigators went further. John
Campbell, independent scientist and editor of the science-
fiction magazine Analog, found that the devices worked
just as well when they were not plugged in to their electric
power source. He went on to make the surprising discovery
that a penciled diagram of the circuitry could replace the
actual apparatus. Scientific research has brought us back to
the simplicity of the Ouija board or pendulum as the most
elegant and appropriate tool for our venture. Science begins
to echo what I've said in various ways throughout this
book: we are the essential ingredients at the Ouija board;
our minds and bodies are inconceivably intricate instruments
capable of receiving and translating information from other
human beings, from other animal species, from the plant
and mineral worlds, and perhaps from "emanations" that
originate in other-than-physical realities too.
I've skipped over innumerable examples of research in
this large soup that goes by so many names—radionics,
dowsing, radiesthesia, the biophysical method. There are
even entire terminologies I've left out, along with their
creators and the important work they've done—psycho-
tronics, paraphysics, psychoenergetics—we may hear from
some of them yet. For those of you interested in learning
more about recent and current scientific work in this field, I
recommend Future Science (an anthology edited by John
 How the Ouija@ Board Works 129

White and Stanley Krippner, an Anchor Press/Doubleday

paperback, 1977) as a good beginning. In these pages
we'll have to let many verifying examples go by
unannounced in order to continue on the trail of our
elusive question. just how does Ouija work, anyway?
Only recently has the equivalent of our question begun
to be asked among researchers in paranormal fields. The
first generation of psychic researchers concentrated on find-
ing ways to show that this bundle of unexplained phenom-
ena did indeed exist. For a while researchers were stymied
by the scientific establishment's insistence on duplicative
tests—experiments anyone else could repeat and emerge
with exactly the same results as those for the original experi-
ment. Very gradually this criterion has faded in importance.
Scientists have begun to accept the fact, obvious to most
nonscientists, that the experimenter's unique and never-
quite-repeatable personality and attitude always affect the
course of any experiment. When the experiment is one in
which the researcher's mind and nervous system are the
primary sensing instruments and raw material, there is no
longer any sense in talking of "replicating the experiment."
The current paranormal researchers, the second genera-
tion, realize that "it is the duty of Science to wait upon
Nature, to reverently listen to what she chooses to tell, and
in the way it pleases her to utter it," as scientist and psychic
investigator Epes Sargent declared in 1868. Paranormal re-
search is at a stage analogous to the beginning of electricity's
development, at which time Thomas Edison was asked
"What is electricity?" He replied, "I don't know, but it
works."
Speculation runs wild and free with regard to the nature
of the energy that spells Ouija words, or allows telepathy,
or creates a photograph of a cow from a sample of the cow's
blood. That it is the same energy we seek in all these un-
explained phenomena is fairly well agreed upon among
psychic researchers. Whether this mysterious energy is ac-
tually a physical, measurable substance, however, makes a
130 THE OUIJA- BOOK
great argument with no conclusive evidence currently avail-
able.
Many of today's paranormal researchers are involved in a
search for the "substance" of this energy, an attempt to
show its physicality. They are encouraged by long cen-
turies of such a force's recognition in cultural traditions the
world over: "prana" in India and Tibet, "ch'i" in China
and "ki" in Japan, the "astral light" of European magic, the
"etheric force" of spiritualism. Several eccentric researchers
of the last century have independently "discovered" this
force also, adding the confusion of their separate terminol-
ogies and the controversy over their work to the general
hubbub. Wilhelm Reich, another inventor who died in a
U.S. prison while serving a fraud conviction, is today the
best known of these researchers; his name for the energy
whose trail we follow is "orgone." Baron Karl von Reichen-
bach, with his "odic force," is another researcher whose
conceptualization of the unknown energy is still discussed
today.
We can compare the descriptions of prana, ch'i, orgone,
all the ways our mystery "substance" has been defined, and
next to these descriptions we can place the results of all the
recent scientific tests for this energy. What characteristics
hold true for every description? Surprisingly, quite a de-
tailed list can be made, though still without giving us the
identity of a physical substance or process responsible for
paranormal phenomena. Six of the characteristics of this
force are:
1 It is associated with every animal, plant and mineral
body, and also is observed to be present in the operation of
electricity, light, magnetism and chemical reactions, though
it cannot be defined by any of these processes or phenom-
ena.
2. Any complex organic structure (for instance, human
beings, plants, crystals, planets) contains a series of geo-
metrically arranged points at which this energy is highly
concentrated (acupuncture points and chakras are ways of
 How the Ouija® Board Works 131
describing these points in people; "ley lines" or power
points are examples on the earth's surface).
3. This substance or energy is everywhere, permeating
every object and filling all space; it is absorbed by organic
material and refracted by metals.
4. In the religious and occult traditions, this energy is
said to create matter and life; scientific studies have only
gone so far as to observe that changes in this energy sur-
rounding living organisms precede changes in the organism
itself (for instance, an influx of the energy precedes a healing
event; before physical death the energy departs).
5. The energy flows between living organisms and ob-
jects, creating "threads" of energy that continue to link
objects (and people) once in any way connected. In occult
traditions it is said that we control these threads of energy
through our thoughts and emotions. In scientific study, this
energy flow can be implied in examples of telepathic com-
munication. It is more dramatically shown in the well-
known studies involving the sensitivity and "feelings" of
plants, or in the field of agricultural radionics, where crops
are treated for insect pests or encouraged to grow by
workers who are hundreds or thousands of miles from the
plants, by using only a leaf or an aerial photograph of the
area to be treated. (The practice of agricultural radionics
has been so successful that it is in a temporary state of sus-
pension in this country, after having been squelched twenty-
five years ago by the pesticide and fertilizer branch of the
oil industry.)
6. This energy can be visually observed under certain
conditions: directly, by people who learn to move their
own states of consciousness to a vantage point from which
the energy becomes visible, or by means of special lenses
or the photographic technique known as "Kirlian photog-
raphy."
Though we still have no concrete definition of the nature
and workings of this mysterious all-pervasive energy, there
are additional hints we can gather through the workings
 @
132 THE OUIJA BOOK
of processes that can be explained and measured by present-
day scientists. One of the most intriguing of these is the
phenomenon of electrostatic fields, first announced in the
1
930's by Dr. Harold Saxton Burr of Yale University. Burr
found that by using extremely sensitive voltmeters he could
measure electrostatic fields surrounding every sort of living
organism—people, trees, salamanders, even slime molds.
These "L fields," as he called them ("L" for Life), show
many of the same characteristics I've just listed for our for-
mative force. Most importantly, the fields register changes
in well-being before physical changes become manifest.
Burr believed these fields to be the actual formative energy
of the universe, the unknown force we seek. He called his
finding "the electrodynamic theory of life," and with his
colleague Dr. F. S. C. Northrop and his pupil Dr. Leonard J.
Ravitz, Jr., Burr studied electrostatic fields for forty years, 'til
his death in 1973. His work has received little attention
from scientists, perhaps because of the grandiosity of the
theoretical claims Burr attached to his findings. It's interest-
ing to note that Wilhelm Reich also came to the conclusion
that electrostatic energy is a manifestation of the ultimate
formative force of the universe; Reich claimed that static
electricity was not really electricity at all, but orgone. Most
of today's paranormal researchers currently consider the
phenomenon of electrostatic fields to be an indicator or cor-
relate of "the unknown energy," something that occurs
with this formative force and is perhaps one aspect of it.
Another valuable hint is contained in the recent research
of three Columbia University physicists (I. I. Rabi, P.
Kusch and S. Millman), who constructed an apparatus with
which they were able to show that every molecule of any
sort functions as a radio transmitter and receiver, continu-
ously broadcasting, with waves varying in length over the
whole range of the electromagnetic spectrum and beyond.
Each molecule has a vocabulary of over a million different
wavelengths. This discovery brings with it some of the
widest implications we've seen so far in our search, just
 Ho w the Ouija Board Works 133

because it doesn't involve any mysterious or controversial

form of energy, but instead pushes processes with which
we are already familiar into mind-boggling extensions.
As we sit at our talking boards, we find that communica-
tion of information, coming to us by means other than our
five senses and resulting in words spelled out by this simple
contraption, has become suddenly an easy process to imag-
ine. As possible avenues of converse we now have:1
. The sensitivity of our bodies to gravitational and elec-
tromagnetic changes.
2. The interaction of our electrostatic field with other
electrostatic fields (including the field of our planet, which,
yes, does have its own field, extending from the ground to
an altitude of about sixty miles, all the way around the
earth).
3. Cellular and molecular communication within our
bodies.
4. Long-range radio signals picked up, amplified and
translated by the molecules of our bodies.
5. Communication over any distance through the me-
dium of the formative energy of the universe, that fills all
space and is absorbed by our bodies. This information may
travel along "threads" of denser energy created by our
thoughts (our questions to Ouija) and connecting us with
sources of information.
6. What will probably be found to be most common,
combinations of all these different processes. It has already
been shown, for instance, that many environmental com-
munications (gravitational changes, sunspots, atmospheric
disturbances) are received first by the electrostatic field
and then passed on to the physical organism. Perhaps a
complex series of translations of information always takes
place, from subtler, less physical forms to more solid, from
faster and more complex to simple and slow. Certainly the
words of a pointer seem plodding and limited when we see
them beside a single molecule with a million wavelength
vocabulary or a not-quite-physical substance connecting
13 4 TH E O U IJ A B OO K

everything in the universe. Just here lies the wonder of our

Ouija endeavor—that, though slow and very limited beings
we may be, we are connected somehow with the mysterious
immensities of the universe around us, and not blindly con-
nected but given the potential to actually know this uni-
verse, to converse with it and so learn who we are.
Not every scientist in the paranormal field is on the trail
of a physical form for the connective energy of the uni-
verse. Some, including the granddaddy of ESP research,
J. B. Rhine of Duke University, believe that the energy re-
search we've described but have not been able to capture is
not physical at all and will never be adequately defined in
physical terms. Other scientists recognize that even if we do
isolate and name such a physical force we will by no means
have come to the end of our search. When electricity was
defined and harnessed, many questions were answered and
many practical possibilities opened up to us, but most im-
portant, the limits of our abilities to perceive the universe
were pushed back into a wider circle, thus expanding our
view of what is and at the same time providing us with a
new, more subtle and profound set of limits.
The unraveling of atomic structure provided the same
sort of redefinition both of the reality we know and of the
universe outside our understanding. Just so, our beginning
knowledge of electrostatic fields, or of molecular radio com-
munication, can potentially make great broadenings in the
circle of our species' "reality," facing us with a correspond-
ingly greater circumference of "unknown." Proof of the
existence of the unknown energy with so many names
would likewise explain much to us that has remained hidden
through countless discoveries of slower, more easily ob-
served processes. And then we would also face a new, larger
unknown.
William Tiller is a Stanford University professor with an
unusually broad and knowledgeable perspective on the
progress of both paranormal research and modern physics.
He visualizes a universe that manifests itself in a series of
 How the Ouija@ Board Works 135

processes ranging from the dense and mechanical, through

the finer and more exacting realm of chemical reactions, on
through the range of electric, magnetic and gravitational
phenomena, through the media in which our "formative
energy" may occur, by way of what Tiller calls "nonphys-
ical space–time fields," where space and time are creative
changing forces rather than the stable givens as in our cur-
rently perceived world. Finally, his vision encompasses the
domain of pure mind—energy with all understanding and all
possibility before it. Dr. Tiller says:
In our very distant future, we are likely to find that
there is only one energy which has manifold expressions
depending on the state of consciousness which interacts
with the energy.
We have arrived calmly and reasonably at that point of
breathtaking surprise, at which we discover that science
and God are no longer opposed. Science, after undermining
the perhaps already decayed religious dogma of the nine-
teenth century, is on the verge of reforging our lost connec-
tion with the Infinite. We are in the midst of the discovery of
our participation in the creation and maintenance of the
universe. We are about to learn that God is not separate
from us, but always accessible, flowing in and out of us.
Dare I say we are about to discover that we are God? This
sort of speculation is quickly losing the accompaniments of
scorn and embarrassment that a few years ago it would have
provoked among physicists or psychic researchers. With
the materialist, atheist bias of the Soviet world always pres-
ent, even Zdenek Rejdak, Czechoslovakia's foremost scien-
tist in the paranormal field, has ventured to say that "this
research is helping to rehabilitate the basic human values,
revealing that the person is not so helpless after all."
We may want to back off from the immensity of the
possibilities we've encountered for a moment, just to take a
deep breath before plunging into the infinite once again.
 @
136 THE OUIJA BOOK

While we sit here blinking and yawning, we may permit

ourselves to wonder what Ouija has had to say on the subject
of its mechanism and the energy that powers its replies. Do
different voices of Ouija concur with the scientists, or even
with each other, on this matter? They do agree to a
remarkable extent, especially considering the widely diverg-
ing beliefs and biases and vocabularies of different Ouija
operators. The most concise Ouija account of the physical
mechanism involved is one delivered by "Stephen," the
voice we have already met. Stephen's explanation, spelled out
in 1920, hints at many of the research results of the 1970's.
"What actually happens during the process of communi-
cation," says Stephen, "is more like the transmission of a
wireless message than anything else in your experience.
Our term receiving station is very good not because it is
metaphorical, but because it is the exact opposite of
metaphorical.
"I communicate by means of a medium quite material. I
utilize a force which man does not now understand, but
which in time he will. A few years ago men marveled at
the ordinary telegraph; now they are reconciled to wire-
less."
"Do you mean," I asked, "that electricity operates this
Ouija board?"
"But surely," Stephen replied, "though not electricity as
you now understand it. The atomic force of which I speak
might be called magnetic consciousness."

My own queries about how Ouija works have produced

messages more akin to William Tiller than to the voice we
call Stephen. Always Ouija has emphasized to me that
"energy is energy," with ultimately one source no matter
how we perceive its manifestation. Ouija has gone on to
say to me that everything we see and experience, every rock
and action and star and book, is energy (rather than just
 How the Ouija® Board Works 137
"containing" energy, but being made of something more
definite and palpable)—an observation that physicists have
been attempting to convey to the rest of us for several years
now.
Here my voices from Ouija go on, and here we leave
science behind and leap ahead into our next chapter. The
words spelled at my Ouija table tell me that everything is
energy when my perspective is an intellectual one. Ouija
says that when I see through the eyes of my heart, then
everything becomes love. Through another perspective,
everything is God. Energy, God and love are each all there
is in the universe. Science pursues the truth that all is energy.
In the next chapter we will bring in every perspective avail-
able to us, and with great energy, love and the guidance
of the perspective from which God is all, we will explore
the geography of the Great Beyond and see what place the
Ouija board may have in that land.
 CHAPTER NINE

The Geography of the

Great Beyond
You know not the full extent of your souls.
Your individual selves have their own integrity --and
still, they are cells in My body.
-AUTHOR'S OUIJA BOARD, 1975

As I explored the Ouija board's possibilities for the first

time, in the same sequence we've followed in this book,
I observed a peculiar process at work. My beginning ques-
tions at the board were simple and usually personal, and
covered all the topics I've already suggested for first ques-
tions. The pointer's answers began with yeses and no's, but
soon included such confusions as "maybe," "sometimes,"
or "yes" and "no" given for the same question. It was at
this point that I began to examine my questions, to root up
the beliefs on which the questions were built and then to
question the beliefs. Gradually my use of words became
more exact and my beliefs more consciously held, aided
by the dependable feedback of the Ouija board, each day
showing me just where I was.
As this process went on, my questions to Ouija contained
fewer and fewer hidden assumptions, fewer unquestioned
138
 The Geography of the Great Beyond 139
or unconscious beliefs, fewer contradictions and much less
overt "content." If last month's question had been "What
past reincarnation is most affecting the life I live now?"
then this month I might say, "Ouija, tell me what I need
to know today." My attitude at the Ouija board, through
this naturally occurring process, became gradually much
quieter, calmer, emptier. I provided less and less of the con-
tent of the board's messages; I created less and less static,
or junky noise, at the board. It took me several months of
Ouija experimentation to realize that a process was at work in
which, as my "noise" subsided, something else did indeed fill
the vacuum. I was in the midst of a shift facilitated by Ouija
from relative truths—those details of my life that find
their meanings in relation to me—to what I've since admitted
is a realm of absolute truth—those details of the workings of
the universe that remain true no matter what anyone thinks or
feels or tries to do about them.
For as long as I could, I continued to think of the Ouija
board as an almost mechanical tool that showed me parts
of myself and could not cause me any great surprise. Laurel
and I pursued "energy" as our Ouija topic, in much the
same spirit as current scientists of the paranormal pursue the
subject, looking for how energy works and viewing it is a
primarily physical phenomenon. Then, in one afternoon's
Ouija session, the little board upset our game and showed us
we were exploring a realm both larger and closer to home than
we had dared imagine. The board's unasked for and, to be
honest, unwanted, message was this:
Hold in your minds all you have learned of energy, and
listen: energy is love; love is energy; energy is all there is;
love is all there is; energy is love is God.

I saw immediately that this statement did not originate

in my beliefs. In fact, I saw that if I were to really believe
this message, my life would change in large ways. My per-
sonality's defense mechanisms, my attempts at building "se-
curity," everything I did in order to be "safe," all of it
140 THE OUIJA BOOK

would be wasted energy, love not given, God denied.

Laurel's reaction was similar: "Wait just a minute—I don't
think I want to hear about God from the Ouija board."
We boycotted Ouija for a few days, 'til curiosity and the
emotional distancing of time passing cleared our defenses
and readied us for more. In the meantime I had read through
the notes from our Ouija sessions with a new ear for the
passages about energy. I came away from the notes with the
slightly uncomfortable hunch that though it may have been in
our own best interests, some trick had been played on Laurel
and me. A definite progression had been made in our
Ouija sessions, from those first straightforward yeses and
no's to answers and unrequested messages, each session a
little bit further from the beliefs about reality Laurel and I
consciously held, 'til finally the pointer triumphantly let us
in on the fact that God was the real subject of these
lessons.
I have since become reconciled to the fact that it is some
larger-than-everyday part of myself that plays such tricks
in order to teach the small earthbound me. In some ways
this idea can be difficult to live with, and we'll touch on
those difficulties later, but at least with this concept we
don't have a being separate from us playing tricks that may
not be beneficial to us. This knowledge does nothing to
lessen my everyday questions and struggles; it merely keeps
my fear of God down to the level of my fear of myself.
Even now, after quite a lot of practice, it's not easy for
me to speak of "absolute truth," or its personalized equiva-
lent, God, for several reasons. I suspect that my reasons will
echo many of yours, so I'll list them here. Most obvious is
that it's not exactly fashionable these days to talk of God at
all from personal experience. Anything remotely re-
sembling personal communication with God through the
Ouija board has a positively dangerous ring to it, even to
my ears. Having a direct Ouija line to Absolute Truth is
just as bad. One of my first thoughts after the session in
which Ouija equated energy with love, with God, was,
"What will people think of our Ouija experiments now?"
 The Geography of the Great Beyond 141
I didn't want friends to assume I'd just stepped into the
lunatic's Great Beyond (and I continue, sporadically, to
hope that readers will not, from that same conclusion, jump
off this train of thought before its destination is reached).
These fears are fairly easily laid aside (though they may
reappear and be laid aside a thousand times), because no
matter how ridiculous or ill-informed or gullible or wrong
anyone finds us, we still must ultimately come back to our
own perceptions and define our experience for ourselves.
This brings us to a more serious difficulty in our attempt to
look Absolute Truth in the face. How can we know we are
not being duped by our own pride and self-righteousness
into seeing God in what is really just one more set of be-
liefs? I'm not immune or inexperienced here, and I imagine
that most who risk using Ouija so far out to sea will occa-
sionally be dunked under by a sudden swell and have to
climb back onto the Ouija raft soggy and embarrassed. This
occupational hazard of deep-sea Ouija fishing actually func-
tions most often as a safeguard that keeps pride and self-
importance from growing to blinding size, so it isn't really
such a fearful possibility after all. We'll make no grandiose
blunders, nothing on the scale of those Alaskan ladies who
found Ouija to be "God's true and only telegraph to eter-
nity," so long as we continue the attitudes we've cultivated at
the Ouija table all along, listening as clearly as we can to
what Ouija tells us and questioning, always questioning, the
board's messages and our own reactions, motivations,
thoughts, desires. I suggest a periodic renewal of this
evaluation process, which you can easily do by rereading
the first four chapters of this book along with your own
notes on past Ouija sessions.
There is one more danger especially associated with re-
ceiving descriptions of God, or bits of Absolute Truth,
whether it be with the aid of the Ouija board or by any
other method. We are so often inclined to mistake the
description for the real thing; we forget that the words and
concepts are merely suggestions meant to lead us toward a
personal experience of God or to catalyze such an experience
142 THE OUIJA BOOK
in someone else who hears the words. Descriptions of the
Great Beyond can serve us as reminders, signposts, crudely
drawn maps that can never be totally accurate but are
better than no map at all. When I finally found the
nerve to seriously ask "Is Ouija really God?" the pointer's
answer was "To varying degrees, yes—though always con-
nected to your temporal beings and so always distorted."
This same sort of distortion accounts not only for differing
Ouija descriptions of the Absolute, but for differences in
the world's religions as well. These differing distortions
needn't be viewed only negatively, as deviations from "the
right description" of the Great Beyond; they can be seen
also as personalized maps, containing exactly "the right dis-
tortions" to enable a particular individual or culture to
actually find the experience of God. The board's great ad-
vantage, as I've said many times already, is that it can
provide us with completely personalized maps of the Great
Beyond.
This praise of individual distortion is not meant to con-
vince us that there is no hierarchy of value, that any Ouija
message is as true as any other. We are walking steadily
into the land Beyond, and the path is as wide as a knife edge
and as sharp as any paradox. The path itself is not made of
words or concepts, though a map of words can lead us
there. My map may help you draw your own but it can't
move you even one step; for real movement, each of us
must create our own map and step along the narrow path
on our own feet. Sharing and comparing maps of the Great
Beyond is important and helpful—most helpful when we
remember that the accuracy of the map lies not in its con-
tent but in the living experience from which it emerged
and toward which it leads us.
As we look at descriptions of this land, at maps of the
Absolute stemming from voices of Ouija, our hearts become
our most important sensing instruments. Here we can see
the necessity of the entire spectrum of Ouija experience
we've followed in this book: from our first curiosities,
 The Geography of the Great Beyond 143
through our gradually growing awareness of our beliefs, to
the shifting and loosening of beliefs that occur naturally as
we become more conscious of our motivations and thoughts,
to the slow emptying of personal concerns at the Ouija
board. All this clears our hearts of debris, which in turn
makes a space for clearer, more truthful Ouija words and
for our more accurate appraisal of those words. Our seat
of judgment moves from head to heart and the medium of
worth turns from logic to love. As one message at my Ouija
board put it: "You are conductors for My knowledge. The
clarity of transmission will depend on your clarity of love
and empathy."
With all this in mind and heart we can profitably take a
look at maps of the Great Beyond drawn at various Ouija
boards. What I have done with these maps has been to lay
them in a stack as if they were transparencies. Then I've
looked through the stack, seeing the lines of mountain and
ocean in each map all at once. In some places the maps'
features have diverged into separate colored squiggles of
meanings; in others the lines of meaning collide to form
single points that line up exactly all the way through the
stack. The features I will emphasize as elements of the
Great landscape Beyond are those concepts that have co-
incided in every Ouija report. This map will be a very
sketchy one with many blank areas owing to the small space
we have in which to draw it here, but even so you may
notice that the geography described is not unique to Ouija,
but shares many landmarks with occult and religious tradi-
tions the world over, as well as sharing much with modern
science. Those connections will be left undrawn, for you
to make if you wish, as our emphasis in these pages will
continue on its personal and experiential course.
Our first clue about the nature of the Absolute is con-
tained in the board's insistence that love, or God, or energy, is
all there is. The voice of Ouija called Stephen explained
that consciousness is all there is; he said that physical matter
is an attribute of consciousness, as are time and space. What
144 THE OUIJA- BOOK
we call God, Stephen called the "supreme degree of con-
sciousness," which is "composed at once of the height of
individual consciousness and of the perfection of individual
adjustment to the whole." The voice of Ouija called Pa-
tience Worth found another way to make the same state-
ment: "Thou art of Him, aye, and I be of Him, and ye
be of Him, and He be all of all."
The voices are emphatic and unanimous in their insistence
that we are God (or energy or consciousness or love), and
that everything we experience as the "real world"—the
passing of time, the weather, mountains, traffic jams—all
are attributes of God, ways that consciousness has found
to express itself. When I first came upon this landmark of
the Beyond I felt at once a recognition from some little-
known part of me that truth did indeed live here, while at
the same time I experienced a sense of uneasiness as a flood
of questions came through me. Does individual integrity
remain when we are all aspects of God? What place has
evil in such a universe? If I'm God why don't I know it? And
on and on. Fortunately the signposts pointing toward
answers for these questions coincide remarkably for the
various voices of Ouija we've met. My questioning thus led
to a more thorough understanding of this universe in which
we think and breathe, while the understanding gained led
back to immense wonder at the mystery of this home of
ours.
We've already been given one hint on the subject of in-
dividuality from Stephen's description of "supreme con-
sciousness." Somehow individuality is absorbed into God—
"individual adjustment to the whole"—and at the same time
not diminished at all—"the height of individual conscious-
ness." The truth and importance of individuality is stressed
elsewhere in Stephen's messages, and in the statements of
other voices as well. Patience Worth says, in a style so
characteristic it illustrates her point, "Thou art ye, and I
be me and ye be ye, aye, ever so." The voices of Ouija
definitely concur on the "ever so," insisting that each
 The Geography of the Great Beyond 145
individual consciousness (not only each human consciousness,
but each individual amoeba and stone and fruitfly conscious-
ness) lives forever in its individualized form, whether that
form be manifesting physically or not.
This is difficult to comprehend in the same breath as the
board's statement of the truth of reincarnation and evolution
of consciousness, but with some effort we can encompass
both aspects of the one reality. The voices of Ouija tell us
that the popular conception of reincarnation is half a truth.
Though we do experience many lives on this planet, learning
from each one and eventually becoming conscious of the
unchanging reality behind the many manifestations, it is also
true that each incarnation houses a distinct, unique being
who will live on in its present form beyond this brief physical
appearance. Jane Roberts, a prolific psychic explorer who
began with the Ouija board, has offered the picture of a self
shaped like a wheel with a hub and spokes. Out on one of
the spokes is the person you know yourself to be in this
lifetime. Other spokes lead to what we call past or future
incarnations. They are all linked at the hub, at which point
resides a larger self who oversees and perhaps coordinates
all the incarnations, and who is focused primarily in some
other-than-physical existence.
All this becomes much easier to imagine if we can set
aside our conceptions of time and space as solid, unchange-
able givens of the universe. Physicists and, more recently,
biologists, astronomers and other scientists, have accustomed
themselves to empty matter and unstable time in order to
be in accord with their findings about the universe. The
rest of us will follow sooner or later—sooner, if we are to
live with the paradoxes given us through Ouija. Stephen
made a good beginning on a simple explanation of the
relativity of time and space:
Time and space are attributes of consciousness. Con-
sciousness, being a pluralistic oneness in process of evolu-
tion, is, as your everyday experience tells you, necessarily
146 THE OUIJA`' BOOK

a thing of relationships. Those relationships that are evolu-

tional you know temporally. Those that result from the
pluralistic character of the whole you know spatially. As
attributes of consciousness time and space are real, as rea-
son or will or form is real. But time and space do not mean
to you what they mean to an insect. Nor do they mean
to supreme consciousness what they mean to you.
So, we begin to understand that, as we are now, we live
"forever," while at the same "time" we also evolve through
many lifetimes 'til we become conscious of everything and
so are God in the fullest sense. This paradox works because
the quality that is time operates in different ways as it passes
through different aspects of the universe. Only within this
matrix we call the physical world do time and space dictate
that future follows present follows past, or that we can be
in only one place at one time. Many Ouija board attempts
have been made at describing the behavior of time and space
as they exist beyond our physical world, but I haven't yet
heard a coherent description. Translation here is very diffi-
cult; what Ouija can do more easily than spelling is lead us
toward actually experiencing bits and pieces of the Beyond.
A moment's experience in this realm can bring more under-
standing than any amount of clumsy word juggling. Still,
the words can sometimes lead us to the edge of experience,
so we'll continue marking out our maps with them.
The place of evil in our Great Beyond is another sort of
paradox: it seems to exist, we can find examples of actions
that appear to be evil any time we care to look for them,
yet in an ultimate, Absolute sense, evil does not exist. Ouija
explanations of evil showed themselves in Chapter Four,
so I won't repeat them here, though the concept is an im-
portant one on our maps of this strange land that is our
home. The idea that evil is simply the nondevelopment of
good—an absence that receives all its apparent power from
our attention to it, whether that attention be focused on
spreading evil or combating it—this concept echoes through
every deeply pursued Ouija experience I've encountered.
 The Geography of the Great Beyond 147

Let's see what sort of universe this small map has so far
described. It is not really a place, our universe, just as I am
not a blue eye, since eyes or place are just one attribute
among many. Our universe is energy, dancing its transmut-
ing, constantly moving, evolutionary dance, in which every
movement and every tiniest variation is remembered and
used and no energy is ever lost or destroyed. We ourselves
and everything we see and touch or even imagine are this
energy, scattered across many realities and individualized
in order to create all possible expressions of itself. Here is
God. I am That I am.
Within this web of energy we find the small planet we
call home, the whole world of physical phenomena, the
conventions of solidity and time and distance, our bodies
and minds and hearts woven into one "lifetime," which we
agree begins with conception or birth and ends with the
body's death—everything we all agree to call the "real"
world. However, our agreements do not limit the universe's
depth and complexity in the least; we have merely suc-
ceeded in limiting our own perception of what is. The
world we think we know is one grain of sand on one white
beach at the edge of the universe's ocean. There is that
much more.
Time, space, evil, love, and we ourselves are among the
phenomena we have perceived so narrowly that the largest
portion of their reality has remained opaque to us. In evil's
instance, the larger reality we've missed is an emptiness, an
absence. Time and space are realities much more dynamic
and creative than we usually imagine them. Love is the
largest reality of them all, for rather than being one of many
emotions, rather even than being an attribute of God as time
or matter are, love is God. Love is the universe, as God or
consciousness is the universe. To whatever extent we love,
we become God manifesting in the world; we act as chan-
nels for the flow of the energy that is the universe.
Now it may be clear why I said our hearts would become
our most valuable sensing instruments as we ventured into
the Great Beyond. Love—not the romantic and sentimental
148 THE OUIJA BOOK

love that wants to possess, but the pure giving we've all
experienced somewhere that accepts totally and asks nothing
in return—this energy is the vehicle that can carry us into
the presence of God. Love is the knife-edge path we walk.
It slices easily through our perception of evil, because when
we love we are not focusing our attention on evil, and
without our attention evil has no fuel. Love can alter our
perceptions of time and space, stretching time 'til it becomes a
connector rather than a separator, and condensing our
experience of space to the same end. When we love our-
selves, the knife's edge cuts through our beliefs about our
own separateness, our guilt, our unworthiness, and we are
allowed to glimpse our connection with that larger self who
we really are, the one who always knows she is God.
Some people have a gift for loving fully, and for them
no other tool is necessary in the exploration of the Great
Beyond. For others of us, intellectual tools can be very
helpful in leading us toward understanding. There are two
such intellectual tools mentioned by every voice of Ouija
and especially stressed by Stephen. The first is the truth
Stephen called "the law of parallels"—the idea of the cor-
respondence between macrocosm and microcosm, most
simply stated in the ancient Chinese expression, "As above,
so below." We can see this principle manifested even in the
physical world: the spiral of a certain molecule is the spiral
of the seed arrangement at a sunflower's center, is the same
spiral in the seashell's anatomy and the spiral also of our
galaxy in its movement. This is connection by synchronicity
rather than by cause and effect. In the same way, the glim-
mers of the Absolute we have been shown through these
many Ouija voices will prove to be true in actual applica-
tion on any scale. My presentation has been abstract in order
to cover a wide field of experience and bring in as few of
my own distortions as possible; translating these truths into
the practical issues of the lives we live now is a work each of
us must do for herself.
The other important tool we have been given to guide us
 The Geography of the Great Beyond 149

in our journey is the truth of evolution. We have become

accustomed to seeing evolution's truth in the physical world, a
' la Darwin. Now, using the tool we've called the law of
parallels, we can see the evolution of physical form as a
small example of a much larger process. Physical forms
evolve in order that consciousness itself may evolve. As
Stephen emphasized: "Evolution is an actuality more po-
tent than earth theorists have dreamed." We cannot help
but become more conscious. Our choices lie simply in
whether we will drag our feet and so evolve more slowly,
or spread those not-yet-formed wings and prepare to fly.
It is at this point, with the addition of "the two great
glimpses," as Stephen called them, that our map of the Great
Beyond almost touches back down onto the ground of
science, left behind last chapter. If scientists were willing
to extend their own use of the laws of correspondence and
evolution from the study of physical matter into the study
of consciousness, our flight into metaphysics could be more
easily seen for what it is, namely, a short tour over the One
Reality we all share. Actually, as you read these words, just
such an extension of science into what has been called God is
being made manifest. The connective work is as yet too
theoretical for mention in our chapter on how Ouija works; it
is too complicated to give more than mention to it here. The
first public hint of such an enormously important shift in
science's focus came in 1977 with the simultaneous and
separate presentation of a new model of the universe by
three scientists. They are David Bohm, a physicist at the
University of London, Karl Pribram, a Stanford University
brain researcher, and Itzhak Bentov, an independent inven-
tor whose specialty is biomedical engineering. Central to
all of their theories is the tenet that everything, including
all matter, is consciousness. The physical world, in all three
theories, is said to be a holographic projection constructed
from elements of "a realm of meaningful, patterned primary
reality that transcends time and space." Bohm and Pribram
published their theories in scientific journals; Itzhak Bentov
150 THE OUIJA® BOOK

presented his as a delightfully simple book for the person

who knows nothing of physics or biology. It is called Stalk-
ing the Wild Pendulum: On the Mechanics of Conscious-
ness (published in paperback by E. P. Dutton, 1977).
I recommend it highly as a technical companion to this book.
Without intending to, Bentov makes Ouija adventure much
more rationally accessible to those of us who feel a need
for that sort of explanation.
We near the end of this small trailblazing excursion across
the universe that we are, but that we don't know. For some
reader, the most important feature on our map will be the
truth of evolution's power. For someone else, a glimpse of
evil's limitations will be most important. In every case, the
importance lies in the concept's ability to facilitate changes
in the way we view ourselves. "So I am changing for the
better, perhaps in spite of myself," our first reader might
say. No matter how far out into the cosmos we seem to have
gone, from where we sit here the significant journey is also
an inward one.
The landmarks and signposts we've encountered on this
tour through the land Beyond are not offered as points of
doctrine. No, my only purpose in setting these glimpses
before you has been to reach your hearts somehow, to strike a
resonant chord with my words in order that you may
experience the truth that lies dormant within the words.
The words, the concepts, are important only as they bring us
to that point of direct experience in which, if only for a
moment so brief it has no measure, we know the universe
directly, we are God. After even one such moment your
life will never be quite the same again; you will never again
be able to totally believe in your limitations and shortcom-
ings. (While at first glance this may seem no loss at all, I've
found I sometimes have a tremendous resistance to giving
up my faults and admitting that I'm God.)
Ouija can be the gentlest of guides in our movement to-
ward more fully experiencing the universe we create and
inhabit. The voices at my Ouija board once described the
process we undergo there in this way:
 The Geography of the Great Beyond 151

Entirely up to you be the words of this message, and

yet the meanings come from across the Beyond. Be assured
of the verity of communication. Keep the conversation
going and you will find our meanings come clearer and
your words become more exact. We will teach you not
through using your minds or speaking through you, but
by allowing you to glimpse ever more accurate and com-
plete vistas of the one reality, which you must form into
articulacies of your own making. This way the regulation
or timing will be your own; the impetus will be yours and
the accomplishments too.

The real journey into the Being we are right now, the deep
mystery we've been calling the Great Beyond, must be
undertaken by each of us individually. Though our maps
show the same landmarks and we follow the same sequence
at our talking boards, what each of us finds in that land is
for us alone. One day as you sit at the Ouija board, some
small surprise it brings dazzles you and only you, and alone
you drop your habits of perception, you forget the usual
way you create the moment-to-moment world. As you
grope for your habits in the wake of surprise, you glimpse
a flash of silver embroidery on a turquoise hem, and spin-
ning a glance round your shoulder you see for an instant
that it is your garment so finely woven. You look up and
it is gone. You sit again in a familiar apartment bedroom,
dressed as usual in jeans and T-shirt and half-smiling now,
confusion mixed with wonder. You shrug and return your
fingers to the Ouija pointer, and these words are spelled:
Tentative moves are being acted out by portions of
yourselves now in far galaxies—the results are forming
your futures in this one. Nowhere are your essences not
known. You are not the small creatures you fancy your-
selves to be. Parts of you inhabit every corner of your
universe—which is not, by the way, the only one.
 CHAPTER TEN

Leaving the Ouija®

Board Behind
When you once get hold of anything of this
sort so it is inside you, at once it begins to work
automatically, so you don't have to fuss with it.
—"THE INVISIBLES," 1937

We've come a long way in this small book. Whether we

began with curiosity or near indifference, with fear or great
expectations about what might be delivered to us at the Ouija
board, we've all come to realize by now that, with every
possible use of the little board, Ouija remains a tool through
which we change. Not only that, but our changes follow a
certain course that transforms us into ever more definite
and clear beings—definite in our beliefs and free of the ex-
cess baggage of worn-out convictions, clear in our percep-
tions of the world without and within us. We have by now
either experienced for ourselves or seen by the light of this
book that Ouija not only propels us through all these
changes, but does so in order to enable us to enter into
conversation with the Great Beyond. Since we are the
152
 Leaving the Ouija Board Behind 153
Great Beyond, and the Great Beyond is God, we can say that
Ouija is a tool through which we enter into conversation with
the parts of ourselves that are God, the parts of us that
reach beyond our conscious selves into the infinite one
reality that is God. Ouija is a tool through which we be-
come more and more conscious that we are God. Let's say it
in the bluntest way possible: the Ouija board is a tool
through which we become God.
We know when our Ouija conversation has entered the
infinite not especially by the words that are spelled, but
by the way we feel, by the way our hearts resonate to the
words of Ouija. If the board's words bring love with them, if
they leave us feeling a deeper and more thorough love
than we felt before, then we know we've been in contact
with the infinite. If a Ouija session doesn't leave love in its
wake, that's fine too. Since love is all there is, when we
don't find love at our Ouija table we know we're dealing
with something that doesn't really exist, some distortion of
the Absolute that finds its home in our beliefs. We listen
to such voices, we change ourselves by their guidance,
knowing them for what they are and are not.
The purpose of Ouija is to prepare us for communication
with the Absolute, and then to introduce us. Once such a
connection has been established from our "blindered" world
into that unlimited One, the key to communication remains
in us. The Ouija board itself is not the key. Our hearts hold
the key to contact with the Great Beyond; all we need is
to feel a clear connection once and we can return. The ex-
perience of contact with our infinite Selves actually creates
neural pathways in our bodies that had not existed before
and that we can then use to reconnect with the Beyond—so
say the voices who now speak to me sans the Ouija board.
Once we have learned through Ouija to communicate
with our larger selves, those infinite beings in whom we
have our home may choose to wean us from the board and
pointer. By now we know that the Ouija board itself is
nothing, that the ability to reach out to the infinite and find
154 T H E O U I J A - B O O K
ourselves there lies in our own bodies and minds, so the task
of communicating with the Beyond without the Ouija
board has become at least an imaginable further step.
Of Ouija adventurers we've heard from in this book—
Hester Travers Smith, Pearl Curran, who brought us "Pa-
tience Worth," Darby and Joan with "Stephen," Betty and
Stewart White—every one of them left the Ouija board
behind at some point in their exploration and continued to
receive information from their voices of Ouija by more
direct means. Many other psychic explorers started their
development with Ouija or planchette, but graduated so
quickly to hearing the words directly or speaking from a
trance state that they left no substantial Ouija work to men-
tion in these pages.
In every case the weaning process follows a unique and
often peculiar course prescribed by the individual's voices
(and here I refer only to those voices our hearts claim as
their own, as messengers from the infinite Heart). Your
voices received from Ouija, speaking at first through the
little board, will tell you if, when and especially how to
move from the board's method to another one more direct.
Sometimes the progression is a swift one. As an example,
Betty White used the Ouija board only once; its only mes-
sage was to tell her over and over, "Get a pencil." She did
get a pencil and began to write automatically, a procedure
she followed at regular sessions for several months in the
presence of her partner, Stewart White. The writing
stopped when it had said it would; in its place Betty began
to go on excursions into the Beyond, in which, while her
body lay at rest, she experienced the lessons of "the In-
visibles" as real journeys through time and space, complete
with sights, sounds, smells and bodily sensations. She re-
counted these experiences to Stewart, often as they were
happening, and Stewart took notes and provided a stability
to which she could return. In some important way Betty
and Stewart White remained Ouija partners; both were
essential to their method's success. In terms of Chapter
One's discussion of Ouija pairs, Betty was the receptive
 Leaving the Ouija Board Behind 155
or positive partner, the one whose mind received and trans-
lated the incoming information; Stewart's role, beyond his
duties as scribe, was to supply additional biophysical energy.
Contemporary psychic explorer Jane Roberts followed a
course similar to Betty White's. Both women initiated their
contact with the Beyond through the Ouija board and went
quickly on to other methods. In Jane's instance, the words
began to appear in her mind before they were spelled at the
board, so to save time she began to speak them aloud. Soon
not only words but an entire personality, with its own ges-
tures and inflections of voice, was speaking through Jane.
(The books dictated by this personality, who is called Seth,
continue to be widely available and I highly recommend
any of them, as well as Jane Robert's own more recent
books dealing with her other psychic adventures.) Jane
Roberts carries on these dictation from Seth with the help
of her husband, Robert Butts, in a working arrangement
almost exactly the same as the method worked out by Betty
and Stewart White. Darby and Joan also developed the
same arrangement for their work, though they stayed with
the Ouija board for a much longer time before trying any
innovations.
Pearl Curran stayed with the Ouija board for a full seven
years before finally setting it aside. In 1918, after five years
of Patience Worth's productions at the board, Pearl began
to know each letter before the pointer spelled it. Soon she
was reciting the letters as they came to her, while the
pointer circled aimlessly. In 1920, shortly before setting
aside the board and pointer for the last time, Pearl wrote
this:
I am rapidly discarding the Ouija board. This has been
coming on for a long time. For months I have been almost
unconsciously dropping the spelling of the words until I
have been able lately to simply recite the poems instead;
though if I become conscious of the change, I have to go
back to the spelling.... I expect eventually to discard the
board altogether.
156 THE OUIJA BOOK

My own evolution from Ouija beginnings has so far

taken a path much less dramatic than that of any of these
ladies with their personalitied voices received from Ouija.
My experience is likely to be a common one so I'll relate it
here. After several months of Ouija experimentation, I
began to know letters before they were spelled, and then to
know whole words and phrases. I refused to believe at first
that the words appearing in my mind were really the words
the Ouija pointer intended to spell, so I kept my mouth
shut and made the pointer continue on its course. It always
spelled the words I knew it would spell. Then I seized the
thought that since I knew the words first, they must origi-
nate in my conscious mind and therefore I must be manipu-
lating the Ouija board in a crass and almost conscious
fashion. I felt disgusted with the whole enterprise. Even-
tually, though, I learned to quiet my thoughts much more
than before, and from that quietness I could feel the origin
of the smaller volume of words flowing through my mind. I
learned to distinguish different qualities of Ouija words
from each other and from "my own" thoughts. Somewhere
along the way I discovered that no thoughts originate in
our conscious minds; they all come from somewhere else
and are amplified into our awareness. I went back to the
Ouija board, using it now as a way to focus my attention
and keep me on course as I said the words aloud, checking
now and then with the pointer when I was unsure what
came next.
What did come next was the pointer's suggestion that
I set aside the Ouija board and speak its words directly. I
did not gracefully oblige. Rather, I felt very threatened and
frightened by the prospect, as I saw it, of setting aside not
only the Ouija board but my very own personality and
conscious self, while some stranger inhabited my throat.
This reaction may seem extreme and paranoid, and it is, but
it is also common.
It was at this point that I realized I would never venture
further into the Beyond, or let the Unknown enter me,
 Leaving the Ouija® Board Behind 157

until I had moved further in two directions. One, I ob-

viously did not believe I lived in a safe universe; I had to
remake my beliefs about the Beyond until they could no
longer hurt me. At the same time, there had to be less of
me to be hurt. I needed to empty my personality still
further, eventually down to the point at which there'd be
nothing of me to lose in the infinite. In such a state, the
information I brought back would be distorted as little as
is possible for any human making the transition from the
infinite to this consensual world.
This is the stage at which I find myself now, still emptying
that which is not true in myself, still creating the universe in
which I can safely travel. I am still learning to listen for the
voice of my larger self, still learning to distinguish what is
true from what is interesting or almost true or what I most
want to hear. I go back to the Ouija board for en-
couragement and clarity, and to play at specific projects
like the mysterious novel of Ouija. I've found that the
truest Ouija voices come to me quietly and unannounced, so
I make a quiet unobtrusive space in myself where they will
always feel welcome, and I turn my ear to that space often
to find out what the voices have to say. It's nothing
dramatic. The voices not only do not boom—they make
no sound at all, just the stillness of knowing, which I then
articulate as best I can into the fabric of my life.
If you feel a need for specific advice about this matter
of bringing the authority of your infinite self into everyday
life, try the words of Betty White's "Invisibles." Their
teachings, directed at Stewart White and, especially, Betty.
were published in 1937 as The Betty Book. The book
has recently been reissued in paperback by E. P. Dutton.
And —need I say it?—remember your talking board. You
mat-want to stay with the little board through your whole
life, or come back to it only when you're stuck somewhere
between here and the Beyond, or you may want to use it
regularly in addition to other tools and other methods. Let
your truest and most loving voices of Ouija guide you.
158 THE OU IJA@ BOOK
Now I've shared with you all I know about Ouija. We
are equals from this point on, fellow adventurers standing at
the edge of the world. My knees shake as I peer over the
cliff's edge looking for some clue, but all I see is a slowly
moving fog bank far below, obscuring the already impene-
trable distance. A shudder goes through me and then a deep
breath as I lose my fearful concentration and begin instead
to savor our common predicament. I turn to you and smile,
my carefully chosen words of encouragement evaporating
on my lips. You don't need my encouragement. God cannot
help but go with you.